Fallen Heroes
by QoS
Summary: The Stunticons find a way to win the war... and to lose everything else.
1. A Sound of Thunder

_Author's note: I should have completed one of my ongoing fics, but this idea's been brewing for a while, and before I knew it I'd written the first chapter. Warning : without giving away specifics, this is a dark fic. The title applies to both sides._

_And speaking of titles, all my stories have chapter titles with something in common. A big plate of virtual cookies to anyone who guesses what links all the titles in this fic!_

* * *

**Chapter 1: A Sound of Thunder**

Dead End's combat radar was nearly always active, but he tended to actively check it—as opposed to letting it run in the background—at quiet peaceful times like the morning on which the Stunticons drove back home.

Of course, that was what led to their doom, as he was to realize much later on.

The sky was still full of blue shadows and the air was crisp and cold against his plating as he drove in his usual flanking position on Motormaster's left. A few days without surface assignments had left Wildrider even more hyperactive than usual, and even Motormaster had started looking as though he was going to drive through a wall sometime soon, so it was probably best if any nearby walls weren't holding the ocean at bay. They left the _Nemesis_ in the middle of the night, headlights off until they reached a human military base.

Then they drew themselves up in a line, lights and hi-beams flicked on simultaneously (with the exception of Drag Strip) and with a blare of horns the Stunticons surged forward in a wedge formation, Motormaster at the head. The resulting havoc was more than enough to satisfy them and no one sustained so much as a scratch, to Dead End's mild surprise. He was certain they would be deactivated when the Autobots showed up, though.

But instead of hitting the highways again Motormaster steered on to a narrower road that wound its way past dense clusters of trees that flicked damp brown leaves on Dead End's windshield. He activated his wipers and drove almost on autopilot, keeping his place beside Motormaster with a skill so practiced it was mindless. The road wasn't wide enough for more than two of them, so Drag Strip and Breakdown were in front while Wildrider brought up the rear, and at that time of the morning not even human vehicles were in their way, not that any of the Stunticons would have cared if they were. Tires ate miles of asphalt, engines purred and a satisfied calm filled their gestalt link.

Dead End felt certain something would happen, though. Perhaps in retaliation for what they had done to the human military base, perhaps because the wind rushing over his polished plating and the road beneath his wheels felt almost… good. Moments that came so close to pleasure never lasted long; the world simply didn't work that way.

So he checked his combat radar screen, observing their surroundings for miles around. And that time, he wasn't surprised to see the two blips that popped up on the periphery of his range.

_Autobots_, he thought even before he amplified and filtered the signals. Sure enough, the shapes he detected were those of mechs. It was possible those were other Decepticons, but Dead End doubted there would be any such reprieve.

He opened a comm line to Motormaster. "_Probable Autobot activity_," he said, and transmitted the coordinates of the two mechs.

For nearly a minute there was no response, and then Motormaster's brakes clamped down. The huge semi came to a halt so abruptly that his trailer nearly jack-knifed, tires throwing up a cloud of dust as they scraped the road. Wildrider hadn't been able to stop in time and he plowed headlong into Motormaster's trailer, which was now blocking the road, but since both their forcefields were active and Motormaster weighed so much more than he did, it had no effect other than to send Wildrider rebounding and make Motormaster growl a threat at him.

_So much for the peace and calm_, Dead End thought. Ahead, brakes squealed and engines revved as Drag Strip and Breakdown turned and raced back to them, Drag Strip as usual trying to get there first. "What's happened?" he said.

"Soundwave reports there are no 'cons in this area except for us," Motormaster said. "But Dead End spotted two mechs about a hundred miles due west. Breakdown, go check 'em out."

Breakdown hesitated, and Dead End didn't need a gestalt bond to know he was wondering why they couldn't leave well enough alone. They'd been fortunate so far; why risk it? But engaging any number of Autobots would have been safer than annoying Motormaster, so Breakdown transformed, drew his gun and slipped into the shadows of the trees by the side of the road. He was lost to sight almost at once, and Dead End couldn`t hear him either.

_At least he'll show up on my combat radar… until the Autobots deactivate him._

The thought of that sent a painful twist through Dead End, as though invisible vises were tightening on his systems, but there was nothing he could do except watch and wait for the inevitable. He wished Motormaster had simply decided to charge the Autobots, though if those 'bots were Superion and Defensor, even the Stunticons might have found themselves outmatched. Breakdown seemed to be aware of that too, because on Dead End's radar screen, a glowing dot was carefully circling around the two blips.

Wildrider had never been good at waiting, though. Even after Motormaster rapped out an order to shut the fragging music off, he shifted back and forth on his tires, primed his weapons and revved his engine, which were all his way of asking, _can we go now?_ Dead End expected the fighting to start at any moment—and nowhere near the Autobots—when Breakdown, somehow still alive, commed them.

"_It's two 'bots." _Even over their internal radios, his voice was quiet and wary._ "One big black mech and the other… I think he's the one you flattered in that race, Motormaster. But they're working on some kind of machine in the middle of a big clearing._"

"_A weapon?_" Motormaster said, though Dead End guessed that would make little if any difference to him.

"_I don't know. It might be a hologram projector… it just produced a shimmery blue screen they're both staring at—_"

"Stunticons, attack," Motormaster said, a grating chuckle just beneath the dark anticipation in his voice. His engine roared, drowning out even Wildrider's howl of glee, and he plowed into the trees.

They were taller than even Menasor, but they went down like matchsticks on either side, crunching and thudding heavily against the ground as they landed. Red and yellow leaves flew into the air like flames. Dead End hung back, well aware that the 'bots would be more than forewarned by the noise and more than willing to let Motormaster take the brunt of the attack, but Wildrider and Drag Strip had already disappeared into the cloud of smoke and fumes Motormaster left in his wake. Dead End accelerated minutely, dodging tree stumps and boulders as best he could. Ahead he heard an explosion, and he had time for one last thought—_I wonder how long the Autobots will take to send reinforcements?_—before he plunged into the clearing.

The bigger Autobot fired a projectile at Motormaster, evidently trying to cover the smaller 'bot who was crouched over the machine. The missile exploded harmlessly off Motormaster's forcefield, but it had bought the other 'bot enough time to wrench out a thick cable. The flat blue light disappeared from the machine.

Motormaster's horn blared and he charged at the black Autobot. That time, the 'bot didn't bother shooting him—he fired at the open clearing between them instead. Chunks of earth and rock boiled up from the ground and Motormaster swerved reflexively. Wildrider and Drag Strip had split up to flank the Autobots and they darted in like the two halves of a pincer, firing at full force.

The air shimmered over the Autobots and the laserbolts spattered harmlessly. _Another forcefield_, Dead End thought as Drag Strip slewed away. Wildrider, of course, came on at two hundred miles an hour. The smaller Autobot lurched up, and his shoulder-mounted cannon glowed.

Faster even than that, Dead End transformed, drawing his compressed-air rifle from subspace. In the split second before the smaller Autobot could fire, he pulled the trigger. A blast of wind stronger than a hurricane slammed into the Autobots and despite their forcefield they staggered from the impact. The missile struck to one side of Wildrider, who peeled away to avoid it.

Before the Autobots could recover, Breakdown—on the other side of the clearing—fired at them.

The forcefield flickered and was gone. Motormaster charged in. The thunder of his engine was so deep and solid that it sent raw tremors through the ground, and his cab—with tons of momentum behind it—struck the black Autobot. Metal crunched. The Autobot went down, hard, and Motormaster transformed.

The few seconds he took to do that, though, were enough time for the Autobot. His legs were a mangled, twisted mess from the collision and one arm was trapped beneath him, but the other was free. He shoved it up, hand retracting to reveal another missile, and he fired at point-blank range into Motormaster's abdomen.

Dead End never saw whether Motormaster's forcefield had withstood that, but the blast made even Motormaster jolt back. He swayed, then fell to one knee beside the Autobot—but his other leg lashed out in a brutal kick. His foot rammed into the Autobot's arm hard enough to shatter purple glass and dislocate the Autobot's shoulder-strut. Then he drew his sword.

"_Trailbreaker!_" the other Autobot screamed.

Motormaster drove the sword into the black Autobot's chest with all his strength behind it. Energy crackled over the blade and danced in bright arcs over the Autobot's jittering body. Slowly the black paint gave way to a dull grey and the light faded from the Autobot's optics.

The other Autobot tried to hurl himself at Motormaster, but Drag Strip and Wildrider were on him by then, grabbing his arms and wrenching them behind his back before they shoved him down to his knees. Breakdown hurried from the trees to join them, staying well behind the Autobot. Motormaster rose slowly, put a foot on the dead Autobot's chest to yank his sword free and subspaced it. Then he turned his attention to the machine.

Dead End ambled forward, wondering if the Autobots had considered the device worth dying for. It hardly seemed deserving of the effort. A small generator was hooked up to what looked like the lower part of a wide steel framework—flat where it rested against the ground, scooped on its upper surface. A digital display in the steel was dark and unlighted.

Motormaster's brow ridges drew together. The paint over his abdominal plating was scorched away, and the metal itself glowed red-hot beneath, but his armor was thick enough that Dead End guessed he was in discomfort rather than pain—and Motormaster would never have given in to any weakness. He turned on one heel and faced the Autobot.

"What's this thing?" he said.

The Autobot stared up at him with burning optics, but didn't answer. Motormaster stooped and hit him across the face, hard enough to snap his head to one side.

"What's this thing?" he said with no change in his tone.

The Autobot turned his head slowly. His mask was dented and a faint crackle of static came from his vocalizer before he spoke.

"Frag you," he whispered, the indicators on either side of his head flickering.

When Motormaster hit him for the second time, the blow sent the Autobot reeling over, one of his arms wrenched from Wildrider's grip. Dead End was mildly surprised the arm hadn't actually been detached, though it probably would be if he defied Motormaster for the third time. The Autobot struggled to push himself off the trampled ground, but before he could do so, Motormaster leaned down, shoved his fingers into a slight gap just above the Autobot's chestplate and hauled him up.

"Let's try again," he said. "What's this—"

The Autobot flung a handful of earth in his face.

Motormaster pulled back, startled, and his grip on the Autobot's chestplate slipped. The Autobot twisted violently. His arm, slippery with spilled oil and half-processed energon, jerked out of Drag Strip's hold and the Autobot flung himself towards the machine. Breakdown hadn't subspaced his rifle and he raised it to fire.

"_NO!_" Motormaster roared, and they all knew the command was directed at them rather than at the Autobot. The Stunticons' natural response to that sort of order from their leader was to freeze, and before any of them could shake it off, the Autobot yanked a lever on the side of the steel framework.

A flat blue sheen, like the rippling surface of a pond somehow held vertical, sprang up from the steel framework. It was easily a dozen feet wide, and even as Drag Strip sprang forward, the Autobot leaped at the blue projection. Wildrider bolted to the other side of the framework to cut off any escape route.

The Autobot vanished. The projection, insubstantial as blue smoke and thinner than Dead End's finger, swallowed him up.

"What the frag…?" Wildrider's optics flashed a blink and he waved his hands at the projection as if expecting to somehow feel where the Autobot had gone. _ A portal_, Dead End thought, _but where—_

There was a clank and slide of transformation. Motormaster folded over into alt-mode and the sound of his engine was like tectonic plates crashing together deep beneath the earth. He roared ahead at the shimmering blue portal.

On the other side of it, Wildrider yelped and ducked out of the way, but there was no need. When he was a dozen feet away, Motormaster lit his thrusters and launched off the ground, straight at the blue surface. He disappeared into it and a sudden silence fell over the clearing.

Wildrider was the first to break it, of course. "Cool!" he said, and scrambled up from the ground. "My turn!"

"No!" Dead End shouted. "Wildrider, we don't…"

His voice trailed off as Wildrider plunged into the blue and was gone. Apparently the portal functioned just as well from either side.

"Hey, wait for me!" Drag Strip said.

"Stay where you are." Dead End rarely if ever ordered his teammates around, much less used that tone with them, but if anything was guaranteed to penetrate his apathy and fatalism, it was fear for his team. Drag Strip stopped in his tracks, caught halfway between Dead End and the portal. He knew what that tone meant, too.

"Comm Motormaster," Dead End said, and did so himself—or tried to. No reply. No one on the other end. The gestalt link registered nothing out of the ordinary, meaning their team was still intact, but on the comm there was nothing but dead air.

"I tried Wildrider, but he's not answering," Drag Strip said after a moment. "Come on, Dead End, let's see where they went. I don't want to just stand here."

"So you want to jump into that?"

Drag Strip made a derisive sound. "Wherever it leads, Motormaster and Wildrider are there. You telling me there's something the two of them can't handle?"

"Yes," Dead End said, folding his arms. "What if that's some kind of teleportation device and it lands us all in the Autobot brig?"

Drag Strip hesitated, then shrugged. "OK. I'll take a look."

_A look?_ Dead End thought. There was nothing to see; the portal was like a blue mirror that reflected nothing. And with their luck, Drag Strip would probably end up decapitated if he poked his head into it. But when he said that, Drag Strip ignored him, stepped over the greyed frame of the dead Autobot and approached the portal. He touched the surface, then pushed his hand in cautiously.

"Doesn't hurt," he said, and grinned at the two of them. His arm was in up to the elbow. "Can't feel anything."

Abruptly his arm jolted in up to the shoulder and he let out a startled gasp. "Something's got—"

Dead End leaped forward, but he was too late. Even as he tried to grab Drag Strip's other hand, something on the other side of the portal hauled him through. Drag Strip tried to pull back but the soft trampled ground gave him no leverage to brace himself. His knee scraped against the upper surface of the framework with a shriek and he toppled forward. He was gone more quickly than if he had fallen into the ocean, and there was nothing but a smear of yellow paint on the steel to show where he had been.

His fuel pump hammering, Dead End tried the comm, even though he knew what he would hear—or more correctly, what he wouldn't hear. "_Drag Strip?_"

Silence. He looked up and met the fixed look in Breakdown's optics—a brittle control struggling to hold back fear—and he felt as though he stood on the brink of an abyss. How had he lost over half his team in just a few unhinged moments? What was he going to do next? Wait for them to come back, comm Soundwave, find another Autobot and beat him into saying what the slagging portal did? That was why Motormaster had stopped Breakdown from firing at the device—to preserve it for Megatron's possible use—but if Dead End had known his team was going to vanish into it, he would have blown it up himself.

"Um…" Breakdown said.

"Give me a moment to think."

"No, I meant, um, the Aerialbots are reproaching."

He pointed at the sky. Of course, the Autobots had managed to comm for help before one of them died and the other disappeared, and now five dots in the sky were streaking towards them at top speed.

"Oh…blast." Dead End took a step back instinctively before he remembered there was nowhere to go. He couldn't abandon Drag Strip or Wildrider, and for the sake of his continued future—what little of it there was—it would be advisable not to leave Motormaster either. Yet there was no way he and Breakdown could fight off five Aerialbots by themselves, especially if more Autobot reinforcements might be on the way.

And while the Autobots had previously just imprisoned the Stunticons after they had been captured and dragged back to the Ark _en masse_, Dead End wasn't sure what would happen now that they had actually deactivated one of the 'bots. He could see his entire team ending up in a drawer as the Combaticons had once been kept.

"I don't think we have much of a choice now." Breakdown's voice was small and quiet, but he took the first step towards the blue portal. His vents hitched once. With a quick look at Dead End, he stepped into it, cobalt-blue and white plating flashing in the early-morning sun before he vanished.

Alone now, Dead End glanced back at the Aerialbots, then around at the clearing in hopes of inspiration. Every instinct told him not to step through the portal—it was too much a blind alley to nowhere—and yet what else could he do? Sighing, he looked down at himself and wiped a few flecks of dirt from his fender-panels.

Then he walked up to the portal, debated for a moment whether to offline his visor, decided against it—he wasn't afraid to see what his death would be like—and stepped through. The portal felt cool and fragile as a thin film of ice.

And stepping through was just like stepping over the steel framework, as if the portal didn't even exist. Dead End's foot came down on the soft grass in the clearing, on the other side of the framework. He teetered for an instant, but then the rest of his body was through and he stood there, bewildered. The rest of his team had clearly been waiting, because they stood around in a semicircle.

"Took you long enough," Motormaster said.

Dead End glanced over his shoulder at the portal, which was still there. _What did it do?_ Where had it taken his team before it had returned them to the same place?

He turned back to face Motormaster. The Autobot lay in a crumpled heap at Motormaster's feet, though he was clearly offline rather than deactivated. Dead End supposed that once they were back at the _Nemesis_, either Soundwave or Vortex could get to work on the prisoner to find out exactly what the device had done.

"Where are the Aerialbots?" Breakdown stared up at the sky, his helm turning from side to side.

"What Aerialbots?" Wildrider said.

Dead End's misgivings had started to climb when Motormaster had vanished into the portal, but now those particular needles were in the red zone. "Drag Strip," he said, "who pulled you in?"

"What? Oh, Wildrider did that, the crazy glitch." But there was amusement rather than anger in Drag Strip's voice. He transformed, spoiler springing up to gleam gold in the sunlight. "C'mon, let's head home."

"Where's the other one?" Dead End said slowly.

On the other side of the portal, the remains of the deactivated Autobot were gone. And now that Dead End's attention was on the clearing rather than on his teammates, he saw how untouched the grass and trees looked. There were no tire-tracks, no craters gouged out by explosions, no fallen trunks. It looked as though the Stunticons had never been there.

Motormaster prodded the Autobot's inert form with his toe, but there was no response and he transformed. "Throw that piece of slag in my trailer and put the machine in there as well. You get in too, Dead End. I don't want him waking up in there and disappearing again."

The last thing Dead End wanted was to be anywhere near the blue portal, but he remembered the lever on the framework that the Autobot had pulled. When he shoved it up again, the blue sheen winked out like a spark being extinguished, and after that he felt slightly better about carrying the device into Motormaster's trailer. He climbed in as well and made himself as comfortable as possible as the door clanged shut. Once they were back at the _Nemesis_, the strange device would be the Constructicons' responsibility and he wouldn't have to worry about it again.

Engine rumbling, Motormaster accelerated away. Dead End could feel his satisfaction through the gestalt bond, and although Motormaster in a good mood was a rare occurrence indeed, he couldn't relax. He jounced and swayed as Motormaster cut a swathe through the trees, trying to ignore the way the device and the Autobot's limp form both slid around with squeals of metal scraping against metal.

"Will you stop moping for once?" Motormaster's voice echoed over the intercom a few moments later. The drive was smoother now, which meant they were on the highway. "We won the battle, we got a piece of Autobot tech _and_ we nabbed a hostage. Besides, Breakdown probably just imagined the Aerialbots."

"Did he imagine that dead Autobot as well?"

Motormaster said nothing more, but Dead End could feel the road unspooling even faster beneath the eighteen tires, and knew even Motormaster was trying to make it back to the ship before anything strange happened. Then his internal radio pinged with a transmission from Breakdown.

"_Yes?_" he said.

"_Dead End… there's something different about the trees. The leaves were red and brown before, but now they're green._"

Before Dead End could reply, Motormaster swerved abruptly. Everything inside his trailer shifted hard, and Dead End stuck out a leg to brace the device, though he didn't bother to stop the Autobot from clanking against the side of the trailer as Motormaster plunged off the highway. A guardrail went down, and once again wood cracked and splintered on either side until Motormaster came to a stop. The Autobot let out a soft semiconscious moan, but didn't move, lying facedown on the trailer floor. Motormaster's engine ticked like the hand of a clock as it began to cool.

"_Are you all receiving me?_" he said on one of the Stunticon frequencies. There was a chorus of "_Yes_" and "_Sure, boss, what's up_?" before Motormaster switched to a common channel that any 'con might have used. "_Now?_" he said brusquely.

"_Yes_." Dead End felt as though his laser-core had turned to lead; the inevitable had befallen them. "_What's happened?_"

Motormaster said nothing for a long moment, then replied, "I tried to contact Soundwave just now, to inform the base of this. He didn't reply. I tried the Nemesis mainframe. I tried comming Megatron directly."

Dead End tried doing so as well, though part of him wondered why he bothered. As Motormaster had said, there was no response. The world was very quiet around them.

Until the trailer door snicked open and the ramp clanged down. "Bring that Autobot out," Motormaster said, his voice deadly soft.

Dead End forced himself to obey, though by the time he had maneuvered the Autobot's limp body to the ramp, Wildrider and Drag Strip were there to haul the prisoner out. Breakdown took the device as well, so there was no risk of it being damaged when Motormaster transformed. He glanced down at the Autobot's body lying on the ground before him, then broke a long branch off a nearby tree.

Dead End spared it a single glance. Breakdown had been right. Crushed trees lay on either side of Motormaster's passage down the slope, and the fresh wounds of snapped branches oozed drops of sap, but there were no brown or red leaves in sight.

Methodically, Motormaster began to whap the Autobot across the face with the other end of the branch, leaving dew spattered across the blue optics and dented mask. Leaves snagged in seams and were torn off as the repeated strikes went on. Motormaster could be very patient when it came to inflicting the precise level of pain or humiliation required to achieve his aims, but it seemed to take a long time before the Autobot's optics glowed and he gasped as he tried to push the branch away.

Motormaster flung it away and put one heavy, black-and-purple foot on the Autobot's chest to hold him down. "What did that device do?" he said.

"Go… eat slag."

_You're just prolonging the process_, Dead End thought. Motormaster gave the Autobot a slow, evaluating look, then turned to Drag Strip.

"Go back up to the highway," he said, tilting his helm at the slope. "Stop a car and bring any humans in it down here."

"Don't." The Autobot couldn't get up but he shook his head, vocal indicators flashing. "Leave them out of this!"

It was too late, of course. It had been too late, Dead End thought, from the moment the Autobot had plunged into the portal, and now they were all following on a downhill road that led in a single direction. Drag Strip scrambled up the slope and out of sight, but a few moments later there was a screech of brakes from the highway. Metal crumpled and glass fragmented. Drag Strip picked his way back down more slowly, a terrified human clutched in one hand.

"It's a time machine," the Autobot whispered.

Motormaster's helm snapped around, violet optics slitted and burning as he stared down. "Go on."

The Autobot had stopped struggling by then. "I built it so we could observe the past, but when Trail… when we were field-testing it this morning we found out it could be used to travel into the past as well. Please, let the human go."

Motormaster bent so he was optic-to-eye with the human, though he did it slowly enough that Dead End guessed the abdominal damage was a little more serious than he was letting on. The human tried to twist away, but Drag Strip held it too tightly.

"You," Motormaster said. "What's today's date? Tell us and I'll let you go."

The human blinked, mouth half-open. "Uh…" There was a pause. "M-may fourteenth."

'The year, idiot!"

"The year?" The human swallowed audibly. "Nineteen eighty-four."

_Nearly three years into the past_, Dead End thought. Oddly enough, he felt a little better—it wasn't as though they had been flung back centuries or millennia. Circumventing a three-year detour seemed a little more manageable, probably requiring less power from the time machine's generator too.

Motormaster took the human between finger and thumb and flung it back in the general direction of the highway, while Dead End moved to stand beside the Autobot, who seemed to be trying to see where the human had landed. He coughed politely to attract the Autobot's attention.

"You can reverse the machine's effects, I take it?" he said.

One corner of Motormaster's mouth curled upward. "Why would we need to do that?"

"Well, what else can we…" Dead End began, then stopped. He felt a dark undercurrent snake its way through the gestalt link, and even without that, the vicious light in Motormaster's optics would have been warning enough. Lifting his foot off the Autobot's chest, Motormaster grabbed him by an arm and hauled him back up before shoving him at Dead End. His grin stretched wide.

"We're going to the Ark," he said.

* * *

_Author's note: This fic references the G1 episodes "More Than Meets the Eye", "Starscream's Brigade" and "Masquerade". Wheeljack and Trailbreaker being a couple is inspired by anon_decepticon's wonderful story "After Atlantis". This fic also references one of the scenarios Wildrider sees in my story "Broken". Please review if you liked reading. :)  
_


	2. SlaughterhouseFive

**Chapter 2: Slaughterhouse-Five**

The Autobot had been silent since Drag Strip had shoved him back into Motormaster's trailer, but in the darkness Dead End could see the blue optics move back and forth, the light in them dimming and brightening spasmodically. He was clearly growing more desperate, but Dead End, sitting at the other end of the trailer, knew there was little if anything the Autobot could do now. _He set the wheels in motion and there's nothing further to be done except endure the ride to destruction._

Outside, Dead End heard occasional crashes and screams, with the sounds of sirens weaving in and out before explosions cut them off—_of course, if this is early 1984, the humans haven't heard of Cybertronians, let alone us_. When a silence fell and the road grew rough, he guessed they were approaching the volcano where the Autobot ship had crashed. The intercom switched on.

"Remember how you dragged us to your ship, Autobot?" Motormaster said. "Remember how the lot of you came crowding out to point and gawk?"

The Autobot said nothing. Dead End couldn't recall him being one of the spectators who had watched and jeered, but then again, he had been in too much pain at the time—not to mention humiliation at the spectacle he made—to remember specifics.

"Remember how you all laughed at us?" Motormaster went on. "Right about… here. Still want to laugh?"

The Autobot offlined his optics. He didn't look again until Motormaster braked hard and the trailer door opened. Dead End wasn't particularly sure he wanted to get out either. The last few seconds of the drive had been smooth enough for him to tell they were inside the Autobot ship by then. Even if they were six months away from their enemies being revived, he didn't want to be among the entire Autobot army under any circumstances.

But when Motormaster's joints and components shifted impatiently, he scrambled out, because the trailer transforming with him still inside would do unlovely things to his bodywork. Drag Strip pulled the Autobot out and Breakdown took the time machine. The place was so dark that all Dead End could see were the glowing purple points of optics and the bright beams of headlights, so nothing seemed quite real until Wildrider found the switch that operated the Ark's internal lights.

For a moment the Stunticons stood motionless, staring at the sight before them.

The bodies of Autobots and Decepticons alike lay on the floor, a few slumped against walls or beside the wide computer consoles. If not for their colors being evident even beneath a thick coating of dust, Dead End would have thought he was in a peculiarly non-discriminatory crypt. He stared at Optimus Prime's form, then at Megatron's frame just a few yards away, but neither moved. The sounds of the Stunticons' engines and the Autobot's hoarse ventilations were all he could hear.

A sharp snap made him start, but when he turned it was only to see Motormaster pull a tow cable taut, yanking on it with both hands to make certain it wouldn't break. Without a word, Motormaster hauled the Autobot to a corner of the vast room and shoved him against a thick spire of rock that jutted out of the floor, lashing him to it with the cable, winding it around the Autobot's fins and wrists. The Autobot struggled wildly and shouted out to Prime once, but it made no difference.

That being done, Motormaster came back to join the rest of the Stunticons, none of whom had moved. He stared down at the rest of the Autobots, his violet stare moving slowly from right to left as if drinking in the sight.

"Right, then," he said without looking away from the Autobots. "Get started."

"Get started on what?" Wildrider said.

"Finish them off, what else?"

Dead End was suddenly aware of how everyone's gaze jumped to him, startlement flickering like electricity through the gestalt link. None of them had any objections to killing enemies during battle, or even deactivating 'bots they had beaten in a fight, but this was a little different. He felt everything they felt—confusion from Wildrider, distaste from Drag Strip and a uneasy caution from Breakdown—but it was as if the utter silence allowed their thoughts to come through as well in a jerky, fragmented flow.

"…_warriors, not executioners…"_

"_Do we have to? Can't we at least wake 'em up_…"

"…_what'll happen to us? I mean, Megatron created_…"

"I gave you an order!" Motormaster snapped.

Dead End groped for the only delaying tactic he had. "I can't fire a compressed-air gun in here," he began. "Maybe we should—"

Motormaster pulled his own atom-smasher rifle from subspace and threw it at him. Dead End caught the weapon in mid-air just as Motormaster's sword flared. From the corners of his eyes he saw the other Stunticons draw their weapons as well.

None of them seemed in a hurry to start shooting, though, and Drag Strip turned his gun over in his hands as if searching for the right controls. "All of them?" he said.

"All except Prime," Motormaster said. "He's for Megatron to deal with. But get rid of the rest of them, _now_."

There was none of Wildrider's usual enthusiasm in his voice. "Boss… can't we just put 'em in the brig?"

Drag Strip nodded. "Megatron might want to deal with them all himself. Maybe he'll want to interrogate them or something."

Motormaster said nothing as he studied the two of them, and the cold sinking depth that turned his part of the gestalt link to a black hole told them all that they had gone too far. "Come here, Wildrider," he said, his voice calm.

"Uh, if it's all the same to you—" Wildrider began.

Motormaster spun on his heel and threw his sword like a javelin at Drag Strip. It barely missed his shoulder and rammed into the wall, splitting that with a harsh crackle of energy. Drag Strip flung himself out of the way, but Motormaster didn't even seem to notice that.

"Come here, Wildrider," he said again.

Dead End could feel Wildrider's despair through the link, but he knew after that little display Wildrider would obey—which he did, shoulders slumping. Not wanting to see what would happen next, Dead End stared down at his fender-panels and tried to think about polishing them. He checked the air pressure in his ankle-tires as well, and wondered how many PSI those could take before they burst.

"Do you remember what happened when _we_ were in the brig?" he heard Motormaster say. "I know you're insane, but are you terminally stupid as well? And the Autobots built the fragging place. Do you think they'll have any problem getting out of there?"

There was a crash as a heavy weight struck the floor, and scuffling noises as Wildrider tried to put as much space between himself and Motormaster's feet as possible, though when Dead End finally allowed his attention to be dragged back to the scene, it was clear Wildrider wouldn't argue any further. Breakdown stayed so still and quiet that he might have been mistaken for another of the offline mechs. Motormaster turned to Drag Strip.

"As for _you_," he said, "since when did you give a slag what Megatron wants? If you weren't such a coward, you'd be jumping in, trying to shoot more 'bots than the rest of us. Guess your paintjob's not the only thing yellow about you."

Drag Strip's optics burned behind his visor, his emotions bitter as acid through the gestalt link, but he said nothing.

"Do it," Motormaster said softly, and his gaze fixed on Dead End with all the intensity of a targeting lock.

_No choice_. Dead End primed the rifle, then pushed the barrel against the nearest Autobot helm, which rocked slightly from the impact. The helm was black. His gaze slid past it and he recognized the Autobot's face.

Dead End could just about bring himself to remember all his fellow Decepticons' designations, but acknowledging the Autobots as individuals seemed not only a waste of effort but a possible hindrance to deactivating them. He was very well aware of their alt-modes, capabilities and weapons, because those were all relevant in battle, but other than that he didn't care. One mech on the road to dusty death was hardly different from another.

But _this_ Autobot was almost his counterpart on the enemy side. Jazz, the only 'bot who transformed into a Porsche, had taken Dead End's part in an elaborate trick Optimus Prime had played on Megatron, something the Stunticons could never forget. Dead End only wished he could feel at least a little of the hatred and revenge that spurred Motormaster on; that might make it easier to pull the trigger. Much as he disliked the Autobots and knew they deserved some payback for that trick, he had never coldly and deliberately terminated an offline enemy. And deep down in his core, a small voice whispered that while Jazz might have impersonated him and clearly enjoyed doing so, Jazz would never have murdered him.

_If I don't do it, Motormaster will… and he'll slag me for insubordination. If I don't obey, none of the others will be able to bring themselves to do it either, and Motormaster will slag them. We've come too far to turn back now._

His finger tightened on the trigger.

The rifle bucked in recoil, and Jazz's head disintegrated into dust. The black-and-white plating with the racing stripes turned a dull grey. The bound Autobot screamed, but Motormaster ignored him. He gave Dead End a satisfied nod, and then his head tilted as he noticed Starscream's prone body. He delivered a swift kick to the Seeker's side.

"Now get on with it!" he ordered before retrieving his sword and moving on to the next Autobot.

It became a little easier after that. Dead End was careful not to look at anyone's face. He searched for faction insignia and the Autobots went from being individuals to being a mass of scrap metal he just had to fire at. It wasn't even as though anyone was screaming in agony except for the bound Autobot, and he stopped when his vocalizer seemed to give out—or when Motormaster finally got tired of the racket and threatened to revive the 'bots one by one before killing them if he didn't shut up. In the background Dead End heard metal shear and twist in the grip of gravitational forces from Drag Strip's gun, but that was good too—the Autobots were even less recognizable after _he_ was done with them. The stench of scorched paint, burned rubber and spilled oil rose thick and heavy in the air.

When it was all over, Motormaster dusted his hands off, subspaced his sword and took his rifle back from Dead End. Even through the haze of smoke and dust, Dead End could see he was smiling again; it wasn't a sight Dead End particularly wanted to see, but everywhere else he looked, there were deactivated Autobots. That was everyone's eventual fate, so there was no point in being squeamish about it, but he still found it repellant somehow. _Still, at least it's finished now_. There was nothing worse Motormaster could command him to do.

"Good work," Motormaster said. It was a terse compliment, but even those were so rare from their leader that all the Stunticons just looked blankly at him. Motormaster didn't seem to notice, though. He subspaced his rifle, then bent to grasp Megatron's shoulders, but he winced as he did so. Not that he seemed to want anyone's help at that moment. Carefully, pushing aside an Autobot head with the side of his foot to make room, he pulled Megatron's body before the computer console, directly beneath the scanners.

The computer activated. Light played over Megatron's frame and different components materialized in the halo, sliding and fitting into place as the computer automatically reformatted him. A red light glowed in the depths of his optics.


	3. The Sleeper Awakes

_Author's note : For the purpose of this fic, I'm assuming the Constructicons were with the rest of Megatron's army all along, rather than being built in some caverns. _

_Also, virtual cookies to Starfire201 for noticing what all the titles have in common. :)  
_

* * *

**Chapter 3: The Sleeper Awakes**

Megatron sat up, fusion cannon already humming into life as his gaze fell on Motormaster. "Who are you?"

Motormaster sank to one knee. "My name is Motormaster," he said, "and we are Decepticons from the future. You built us, Lord Megatron, and we are your loyal warriors. As proof…" He swept a hand out to indicate the Autobots' corpses.

Megatron's optics gleamed, and he got to his feet. "You did this?"

"My team and I did this." Motormaster accepted the hand Megatron extended to him to help him rise. "Dead End, my second-in-command." Dead End tilted his head, hoping he wouldn't have to make a profession of allegiance for the second time in his life, but Motormaster continued. "Breakdown is our scout and Wildrider's the terrorist."

"Hey, what about me?" Drag Strip said.

Motormaster jerked a thumb in his direction without looking away from Megatron. "Oh yeah, that's Drag Strip."

Megatron didn't bother looking either, since his gaze had alighted on Optimus Prime's frame. "He still functions."

"He does," Motormaster replied. "The honor of deactivating _him_ should be yours, my lord."

Megatron's mouth curved in a smile. "Loyalty _and_ good judgment. There are others in my army who could learn from you, Motormaster!" He waved an arm at the Decepticons' bodies. "And speaking of my army, it's time to bring them online as well."

Motormaster turned to the Stunticons. "You heard him—start reviving the rest of them. Lord Megatron…" He turned back. "When you created us, you promised us this planet would be ours."

A brow ridge quirked above a red optic. "And you wish to collect on that claim?"

"I do." Motormaster's voice was respectful, but there was nothing hesitant about his tone. "My team—the Stunticons—were created by you from Earth vehicles and this rather than Cybertron is our home. We will remain loyal to you no matter the place or time, but this planet is what we were given and what we want."

Megatron let the silence draw out fine as a wire before he shrugged. "I have no use for this planet, Motormaster, other than to collect as much energon as we need for our return to Cybertron. If you want it, it's yours—provided you tell me how you came to travel through time and give me that technology."

"Of course," Motormaster said. "The time machine is over here."

Dead End didn't listen any longer as he went about the process of getting the Autobot shells out of the way and pulling the Decepticons towards the reformatting ray—not an easy task when so many of them outstripped him in weight. And not all of them seemed to notice his insignia when they revived, either. Skywarp immediately stuck a gun in his face, and if Megatron hadn't noticed that and rapped out a command just in time, Dead End thought he would have made the best-looking corpse in the collection. After that he had Breakdown, weapon in hand, stationed by the computer console so that they could get the drop on any 'cons more belligerent than grateful.

Starscream, of course, was the least appreciative of the lot. He rubbed the dent in his side, looked suspiciously about the room and asked why exactly Megatron had felt some need to build five groundpounders—_if _indeed Megatron had actually built them. Dead End ignored him, but Drag Strip made a sarcastic reply about Megatron obviously being disappointed enough in his air support not to bother creating any more of those.

At that, Stasrcream advanced on him with a null ray primed, but Motormaster got there first. "Stay away from my team, got it?" he said, and hauled Drag Strip away by one arm, shaking him for good measure before he dumped him next to the time machine. _Where he's safest_, Dead End thought, because Megatron wouldn't allow anyone to damage the device.

By then he and Wildrider had finished reviving the rest of the Decepticons, though they all reacted more or less in the same way when they discovered who had brought them all online. Dead End knew that mechs who had known each other for millions of years would not react warmly to sudden strangers in their midst—he'd seen that often enough on the _Nemesis_ since the Stunticons had been brought online—but at least then the other Decepticons had been aware of Megatron's plan to create them. Rumble had stolen their frames, the Constructicons had helped design and build and paint them, Soundwave had recorded their activation by Vector Sigma.

Now, no one knew them… or seemed to want to know them. Bonecrusher muttered that these newcomers, whoever they were, seemed to have grabbed all the glory they could instead of leaving the 'bots for those mechs who had been fighting them for millennia, and Scrapper told him to ignore them. "We have work to do. Constructicons, let's see how much of this ship we can salvage," he said, and led his crew off. Dead End watched them go, wishing—insofar as he ever wished for things to improve—that they had stayed.

Then he remembered that _these_ Constructicons had played no role in their creation at all. _Which raises the question of who exactly created us, in this brave new world_.

Before he could think about that further, though, Breakdown sidled up to him. "Everyone's staring at me," he whispered. "Can we go someplace else?"

Dead End glanced around. Wildrider was playing with the computer controls and Drag Strip, still parked by the time machine, was pretending not to notice that he was being ignored by all the other 'cons. Motormaster and Megatron finally seemed to have finished talking, though, and Megatron turned to look at Optimus Prime's body, which still lay in the middle of the floor. No one had gone near it, and the other Decepticons stood around the periphery of the room in little groups, waiting for their orders.

"Dirge." Megatron's voice rang out. "Thundercracker. Revive him."

Even Wildrider backed away from the computer at that, and Dead End went over to the time machine. He didn't fear any 'bot, even Optimus Prime, but the Autobot leader had been able to silence even Motormaster when they had been captured and locked in the brig, and Dead End didn't look forward either to that or—which was more likely—to Prime's long-drawn-out death at Megatron's hands. Breakdown stayed hidden behind him, but Motormaster didn't even seem to notice that. He watched greedily as Dirge and Thundercracker pulled Prime's body beneath the reformatting ray, releasing him so his helm clanked against the floor.

The ray glowed down. Across the room, the other Autobot strained against his bonds before slumping back. Optimus Prime sat up. He froze at the sight of Megatron, and his helm turned slowly as he saw he was surrounded.

"Prime!" the other Autobot cried out, and Prime's startled gaze went to him at once. "I'm so sorry…"

"Wheeljack." Prime was on his feet in the next moment, and a dozen weapons immediately locked on him. He didn't move, though when he looked at the deactivated frames of the other Autobots, his hands clenched into fists.

"You murdered them!" he said to Megatron.

"No." Motormaster stepped forward, drawing himself up to his full height, optics alight with triumph. "I did that—and enjoyed it. Payback is a glitch, isn't it?"

Prime looked at him with evident incomprehension. "Who _are_ you?"

"Motormaster, leader of the Stunticons and the King of the—"

"Hey," Skywarp broke in, "he looks like he's got the same alt-mode as Prime, doesn't he?"

"I wonder what else they have in common," was Starscream's contribution.

Motormaster glared at them both, but the interruption had given Prime all the time he needed to grasp the situation. "You slaughtered my friends while they were defenseless?" he said, still sounding incredulous. "How could you do such a cowardly thing?"

"So ungracious in defeat, Prime?" Megatron said as Motormaster's helm snapped back, fury flashing in the violet optics. "You should be on your knees begging for mercy—for your single surviving Autobot, if not yourself—rather than trying to antagonize a loyal and effective Decepticon."

"A strutless mass-murderer, you mean." Prime no longer even looked at Motormaster. "Tell me, Megatron, would _you_ have needed to have your enemies offline before you dared attack them?"

"Shut the frag up!" Motormaster said through clenched jaws.

"Don't allow him to get beneath your plating," Megatron said before he turned his attention back to Prime. "No, I wouldn't. But I fail to see why it is somehow better to destroy one's enemies in battle, with casualties on both sides, injuries and collateral damage, rather than simply and swiftly deactivating them as Motormaster has done. Could you explain that to us, Prime?"

When there was no reply other than a contemptuous look from Prime, he smiled faintly. "But don't worry. I have no plans to deactivate you at the present. I even intend to take you back to Cybertron with us. Starscream, see that he and that inventor who so thoughtfully contributed to our cause are securely locked in the brig. I want two guards stationed there at all times."

"Certainly," Starscream said with a grin, raising one of his null-ray guns. "This way, Prime. Roll out. Skywarp, get the other idiot."

Dead End watched as they left and Megatron gave the other 'cons their assignments. He wanted Soundwave's cassettes to get the lay of the land and spy out energon sources, he wanted Soundwave himself to have the communications systems up and running so they could contact Shockwave on Cybertron, he wanted Thrust to find out where the _Nemesis_ had crashed, because whoever this planet's natives were, they didn't need to obtain Decepticon technology. Dead End considered giving him the coordinates of the ship, but the Stunticons in general seemed to have faded into the background, and even Motormaster stood there looking faintly irresolute and evidently waiting for orders that did not come.

_Megatron's not used to us,_ Dead End thought. _At least, not this Megatron. He doesn't know our capabilities and we don't factor into his long-range plans. He's probably _glad _he doesn't have to take us back to Cybertron with him_. It was a sobering thought.

After what felt like a very long time, though, Megatron seemed to notice they were there. "Motormaster, you and your team can take that device to the nearest laboratory for the Constructicons to look over later," he said. "By the time you secure it and have your battle damage seen to, we'll have energon again and you can return here for your share of it."

"Yes, Megatron." Motormaster saluted and Dead End helped Wildrider to pick up the machine, while Drag Strip took the generator. Breakdown, who was most familiar with the Ark's layout, went ahead to find the closest laboratory and they set the time machine down on an empty workbench.

"What do we do now?" Wildrider said—as usual, vocalizing what they were all thinking.

Dead End tilted his head at Motormaster's abdominal plating. "You could get that repaired."

"Get _what_ repaired?" Motormaster was always testy when it came to damage he'd received, unless that was bad enough to have incapacitated him, meaning he couldn't ignore it. "And the Constructicons are busy, or haven't you noticed?"

"Even if they weren't, I wouldn't want to go to them," Breakdown said. "To them, we're strainers."

There was a moment of bewildered silence before Wildrider shook his helm hard and said, "Uh, OK. What I wanna know is what's going to happen to us now we messed with the timeline?"

"What the frag are you talking about?" Motormaster stared down at him, brow ridges knotting beneath the heavy cowling around his head. "Nothing's happened to us, so let's get out of here and find a place we can use as a base of operations when the rest of 'em leave."

He turned to go, and stopped. Starscream leaned casually against the doorframe, wings casting a wide slanting shadow into the room, but he swiveled as if to make room for Motormaster to pass. No one moved except for Breakdown, who slid behind a worktable as fast as he could.

"Goodbye, Motormaster," Starscream said pointedly. "I'll take charge of that device now."

"Megatron said it was for the Constructicons."

"I was a scientist, though of course _you_ couldn't be expected to know that." Starscream straightened up. "I'm also the Air Commander, which makes me the second-in-command of this army, which means I outrank you. So get your Prime-shaped aft out of here before I throw you out."

Motormaster's engine growled, and Dead End moved automatically into a flanking position—both to give Motormaster enough room to swing a fist and to defend his side. Another Seeker appeared behind Starscream, shadows turning white armor to grey and grey plating to a funereal black. Dead End's fuel pump jolted, but he recognized Ramjet a moment later.

He wondered if any of the other Seekers planned to back their commander up. It occurred to him that in the here-and-now, they had one great advantage—none of the 'cons knew about Breakdown's ability to sabotage mechanical devices with his engine's vibrations—and that might well be their final card to play if they were in a no-way-out situation.

"You can try, traitor," Motormaster said softly.

Starscream looked offended. "Don't insult Ramjet like that."

"I'm talking about _you_, you backstabbing loser. Yeah, you heard that right, you're a failure even when it comes to betraying our leader. Even with the Combaticons behind you, you couldn't—"

"The _Combaticons_?" Starscream said, staring at him.

A sudden flash on the other side of the laboratory made them all whirl to face the new threat, but the winged shape which appeared was Skywarp, a cheerful grin on his face. "Sorry I'm late," he said to Starscream. "What's going on?"

"Nothing. These idiots are talking about some 'cons who were locked in a detention center long before we left Cybertron." Starscream's expression hardened from speculation to a sneer. "Are you and your little gang political prisoners as well, Motormaster? Is that why you ran away from your own time and place to come here?"

Motormaster's optics narrowed. "That's it," he said, and sent a transmission, opening the link to his speakers so they could all hear the exchange. "Lord Megatron? This is Motormaster, seeking permission to beat some respect into your second-in-command."

There was an instant of silence on the other end—Starscream's posture had tensed, wingtips twitching—but Megatron only said, "Your reasons why?"

"I'm not interested in taking his rank, so this isn't a leadership challenge," Motormaster said. "But I've had it with his backbiting and jealousy."

"Jealousy?" Starscream snapped. "What the slag do you have for me to be jealous of?"

"Megatron's trust," Motormaster said. "You may want to know, my lord, that in our own time, Starscream tried to betray you and seize leadership of the Decepticons numerous times."

Megatron laughed, the sound echoing over the comm link. "I'm not surprised to hear that. Very well, Motormaster, if you wish to meet him in combat you're free to do so—in public. There's plenty of space outside this ship, my warriors will enjoy the entertainment and I've never been averse to—"

"Megatron!" Starscream cut in, voice full of indignation. "Do I have no say in this?"

"No. Unless you want to decline his challenge? Perhaps you're concerned for your chances of victory."

Starscream's mouth thinned to a line. "Never. Not against any groundpounder… yourself included, _my lord_." His optics went to Motormaster, and they looked like glowing red pits in his head. "Let's settle this."


	4. A Wrinkle in Time

**Chapter 4: A Wrinkle in Time**

_This won't end well_.

Dead End thought that about everything, but after Motormaster strode out of the Ark and the Stunticons followed, the bright sunlight outside seemed to pick out every scrape and dent on his chassis. Where the black Autobot's missile had impacted, the thick plating was twisted and deformed, with a glisten of oil or lubricating fluid seeping out. The purple glass of his cab was splintered, but the violet gleam of his optics was as sharp and feral as it always was when he faced an enemy. _Or a victim_.

Starscream took his time to make an appearance, and before he arrived all the other 'cons had gathered outside the Ark, forming a ring around the Stunticons. Megatron sat on a huge boulder nearby and high above them, Laserbeak and Buzzsaw perched on the ship's engines jutting out of the side of the volcano. Bets were clearly being placed, though no one invited the Stunticons to join in the wagering, and Dead End could tell that few if any 'cons were wagering on Motormaster.

_Why should they? They don't know him_. And if they did, they might have been able to tell that his forcefield had gone down hours or years ago, under the barrage of fire from the Autobots in the clearing. The first direct hit from a null ray would knock out his systems. Motormaster's own weapons were equally powerful, but there was a reason he obviously wasn't bothering to draw them. Even when his sword crackled with raw energy, it would never be as fast as Starscream, never be able to strike a Seeker who was lightning incarnate.

Motormaster was going to lose… and Dead End had to admit that was probably the better outcome for the rest of the Decepticons. If he won, he would not be replacing Starscream with a newer and better Air Commander; he would simply be humiliating a Decepticon who had earned his place in the ranks, a skilled flyer who was far better known to everyone there than the Stunticons were. Whatever Megatron might have felt for Starscream personally, he wasn't likely to thank Motormaster for that.

_Of course, losing would be almost as bad. Catch-22_. Megatron owed them his victory, so perhaps it would not turn into a feeding frenzy as every other 'con closed in on then, but at best they would slink away from the Ark in disgrace. Dead End did not want to imagine what it would be like to live with Motormaster under those circumstances.

The only ray of light in the gloom was the fact that they had been constructed from Earth vehicles. The Stunticons could survive on gasoline and diesel long enough to find or manufacture energon, though Dead End wasn't sure how to do either of those.

"Whoa," Wildrider said suddenly, staring at the entrance of the Ark. Dead End turned to look.

A vision in gleaming red and white strode out, dark helm tilted arrogantly high. As silence fell, the only sound was the grit of sand beneath feet as blue as the sky, and all the light in that sky blazed from the polished metallic white of his armor. The red looked even deeper in comparison, raw and visceral and hungry. Starscream turned a slow semicircle, letting the glass of his cockpit flash liquid-amber in the sun, and inclined his head in a minimally correct bow to Megatron.

"Slag," Wildrider said, sounding absolutely slack-jawed. "I could overload just _watching_ that."

Motormaster spun on his heel, engine snarling, but for all his faults he knew better than to hit his subordinates before a crowd of mechs who were strangers at best and enemies at worst. So he only glared down at Wildrider, said, "I'll deal with you later!" and turned back to face Starscream.

"If you're done preening, let's get on with it," he said, and strode out into the middle of the makeshift arena. Starscream took a few paces forward as well, unhurriedly.

Then he transformed, wings and nosecone flipping up, arms drawing in and folding so only the long guns were visible. His afterburners lit and he soared into the air, peeling well away from Motormaster. Smoke and vapor plumed in his trail.

Motormaster stood where he was, making no move at all. He simply watched as Starscream gained altitude and did a lazy circuit over the arena hundreds of feet overhead. _It would be insane to try to take Starscream on in his element,_ Dead End thought as he sensed ice-hard patience through the gestalt link_, so we're waiting for him to come back to the ground_.

Without warning, Starscream did. He flipped into a dive, turbines roaring as they propelled him far faster than gravity alone could. He arrowed down in a straight line that ended at Motormaster's uplifted head, and both guns fired.

Except Motormaster had been watching for that—every nanometer of every circuit in every processor had been bent on gauging Starscream's speed and weaponry—and he flung himself aside. He sprawled full-length on the ground, null rays sizzling against the ground where he had been a moment earlier. Starscream twisted, turning his fall into a swoop, and fired again just as Motormaster scrambled to his feet.

That time Motormaster didn't dodge—he dropped into a crouch instead. The null rays shot just over his helm, missing him by less than two feet, and nearly hit Soundwave's cassettes, who leaped to get out of the way. Laughter and jeers came from all sides as Starscream tilted gracefully and roared away, but when Dead End glanced at Megatron, he knew they were on shifting ground. Megatron's expression had gone from alert and watchful to impatient, and it was obvious he expected Motormaster to do something other than simply evading attacks.

"Never thought I'd be pulling for him to win," Drag Strip said softly as Starscream swept in again.

Dead End silently agreed. Starscream was coming in low now, all but hugging the ground so Motormaster would have no chance to dodge—and from the looks of him, Motormaster wasn't likely to be doing that again. Even over the thunder of engines and shouts of the crowd, Dead End was close enough to hear a quiet but ominous sound—gears and cogs grinding together in Motormaster's midsection, where the supply of lubricating fluid had finally given out. Every movement he made scraped internal components together, damaging them further. He had to have been in pain, because his lips were drawn back in a grimace, but as always, nothing changed the look in his optics.

Starscream hurtled towards him, a red streak splitting the air. And Motormaster leaped. He lit his own thrusters and shot fifty feet into the air—but he was an instant too slow. A null ray hit his right leg, the spark of fire in that thruster winking out at once, but he was airborne and had a moment of inertia on his side. Starscream was flying far too fast to react, much less bank or tilt, as Motormaster plunged down from above.

If he had hit Starscream, it would have been the equivalent of a broadside collision, and the Seeker had never been built who could withstand sixteen tons ramming his chassis from above. At Starscream's speed, though, nothing on Earth could have hit him squarely. Motormaster did not—but one huge purple hand snagged a white wingtip.

"Go, boss, go!" Wildrider yelled.

Starscream jerked violently, speed killed. He spun about the pivot of Motormaster's fist gripping his wing, slammed into Motormaster's frame and transformed as well, fighting to stay on top as the two of them crashed to the ground together. Decepticons drew back on all sides as a cloud of smoke and dust burst up to hide everything.

Dead End stood very still, seeing nothing. All his attention was on the gestalt bond, where the fury and power and cold cruelty had just vanished. He felt as though his fuel tank had just been yanked out, leaving nothing but a vacuum behind.

"_Motormaster?_"

There was no reply. The Seekers were shouting encouragement to Starscream, who could just been seen staggering to his feet, half-hidden by dust. The polish job he had clearly given himself before the duel would be ruined, not that Dead End cared one jot about that now.

He activated his combat radar and searched for the Stunticons. The radar sweep covered the land two hundred miles away in every direction, and four blips popped up on the screen.

"What the frag happened?" Drag Strip had felt it too.

"Did…" Breakdown lowered his voice even further, not that any 'con was close enough to hear. "Did Starscream kill him?"

Wildrider shook his head, optic ridges coming together. "Can't be… we'd have felt that, right? He's just…"

"Gone," Dead End said quietly.

The dust was starting to settle as Starscream looked around, even glancing at the ground beneath his feet. A few fragments of amber glass glinted there, fallen from his broken cockpit, but there was no evidence of Motormaster at all—no wrenched-off tires, no purple splinters, no scrapes of black or grey paint on Starscream's armor.

"Where did he go?" he shouted at the gathered Decepticons in general. "Motormaster! Where the frag are you hiding now?"

"Maybe he teleported!" Skywarp yelled back.

Starscream's frustrated expression gave way to blank unease. He peered back over his shoulder as best he could—a tall vent blocked the effort—and stretched out both hands, clearly trying to cover as large an area as possible with his guns.

Some of the other 'cons began to get into the spirit of the new game. "Maybe he's invisible, like that Autobot spy!" "Maybe he dug his way into the ground!" "Look out, Screamer, there he is!" Starscream's expression grew steadily darker as the jibes went on, and finally he let out an audial-splitting screech of rage.

"_You!_" He leveled an arm at Dead End. "Where is he?"

"What does it matter? You win by default, don't you?" Dead End couldn't have cared less about the outcome of the duel, or even about the consequences of being shot in the face with a null ray. Not after what had happened to Motormaster.

Starscream hesitated, clearly mulling over the win-by-default part. "Well, of course I do," he said finally. "Prime was right about that much—your leader's a coward who couldn't stand up to me in battle."

Dead End closed a hand around Drag Strip's arm before he could say anything in reply. "That's right," he said. "All hail Starscream, veni vidi vici, hip hip hooray. Until next time, Commander."

He started toward the Ark, Drag Strip in tow and Breakdown staying close on his other side. Wildrider brought up the rear, but they all stopped in their tracks when Megatron said, "Dead End."

Dead End glanced up. Megatron hadn't moved from his place on the boulder, but the fusion cannon was pointing straight at him.

"Where is Motormaster?" Megatron's voice was dangerously calm.

"I don't know." Dead End knew the mech he faced was more than adept at seeing through lies—as the saying went, _you can't con a 'con_—but if he told the truth…

"You do," Megatron said. "If you didn't know, you'd be looking for him out here. For the last time, where is he?"

Dead End swallowed through a dry intake. He was vaguely aware of Breakdown trembling at his side, and that helped to ground him a little; whatever happened, he had to keep his team safe now that Motormaster was gone.

"I don't know," he said again, wishing he had more practice in speaking with emotion in his voice. He knew the flat monotone didn't sound convincing, so his only chance was to try a half-truth. "Because he is nowhere in this place or time, Lord Megatron. Our gestalt bond doesn't detect him." Now came the lie. "The time machine must have returned him to the future now that his work here was done."

He couldn't tell if it had worked. Megatron's optics showed him nothing but tiny red reflections of himself, and in the frozen silence a wind sifted dust against his feet. Deep in his core, a gestalt link broken so fast there had been no time for pain—only for a shocked numbness—reached for its fifth part, straining for completion, and found only a void.

But after what felt like an hour, the fusion cannon swung away from them and Dead End forced himself to move on legs he could barely feel. He headed towards the shadows of the Ark, hearing talk start up again behind them as the Decepticons speculated on what had happened, but he didn't listen. They might know what it was like to see a comrade or wingmate die in battle, but he doubted any of them felt the threads of fear that crawled through his circuits. _Where once were five, there now are four… and after that?_

As soon as they were in the Ark, Drag Strip yanked his arm from Dead End's grip. "Let go of me! What are we going to do?"

"Are we gonna disappear too?" Wildrider said, and his voice was so quiet Dead End knew that he, the most fearless of them all, was afraid.

"No," Breakdown said, but he didn't sound certain at all. "If we were going to varnish too, it would have happened by now, wouldn't it?"

"Well, why would that just happen to the boss and not to us?"

_We're in this together_, Dead End thought. _We went through the machine _en masse_, and we deactivated the Autobots together, so I have to assume we'll disappear too. Without warning, when we least expect it, we'll be wiped out of existence._

The prospect was peculiarly disturbing even to Dead End, who thought about death quite often. But his ideal death was one where he would be painlessly taken down in battle, with a perfectly placed shot straight through the laser-core, leaving the rest of him shining and flawless. He also imagined himself lingering a few moments after the Fatal Shot, so he could impart words of farewell to his teammates, divvy up his possessions accordingly, tell Motormaster exactly what he thought of him and dictate what he would like to have engraved on his Crypt marker.

That would be a dignified death, as opposed to what had happened to Motormaster. There weren't even remains to take back to the Crypt, and from the last few intact seconds of the gestalt bond, Dead End knew Motormaster hadn't even realized what was going to happen to him. There had been no time at all for him to react.

_Time_. _Is that running out for all of us?_ Dead End didn't know, but he had to assume the worst. And now he knew there was something more horrifying than death—nonexistence in a place and a time where no one would even remember them after they vanished from the face of the earth. _Even the Autobots left their bodies behind. I knew they were the fortunate ones._

He shook himself free of brooding with an effort and switched to one of the Stunticon channels. "_We're going to use that machine to go back where we came from. When we came from. Breakdown_?"

Breakdown nodded, the scout in him struggling above the disorientation of loss and fear. He didn't bother transforming, only picked a corridor and hurried down it, overhead lights flickering in his wake. One or two of them went out altogether, but in the near-darkness Dead End saw glowing red points at the end of that passageway long before they drew close.

Ravage uncoiled himself like a shadow made steel. Wildrider transformed, hi-beams flicking on, and Ravage snarled at the sudden light, the missiles on either side of his frame priming to fire.

"_Don't_," Dead End said on the Stunticon channel. Even if they took Ravage down before he had time to send a transmission, Soundwave would know about it—and there was just enough light for him to see the door to the laboratory behind Ravage. The lock was melted to slag, fusing the door shut. By the time they offlined Ravage and got through that door, the rest of the Decepticon army would have arrived.

"What are you guarding, Ravage?" Drag Strip said. "Your glitch-mouse collection?"

Ravage's lips curled back from fangs that could pierce titanium plate. "_No one gets past without Megatron's permission_," he transmitted, tail lashing. "_Now frag off unless you want to fight. Or do online mechs scare you too much_?"

Wildrider's engine growled, but Dead End moved between him and Ravage. It wasn't a fight he wanted to avoid, it was wasted effort. Without the time machine, they were all doomed, so the most sensible thing to do was to find some quiet corner where they could come to terms with their fate or high-grade themselves into oblivion, whichever worked best.

"_What now_?" Breakdown said, and the question jolted Dead End even through the thickening fog of despair. He looked at his three teammates, knowing at once that they wouldn't settle for a dignified surrender to the inevitable. _And Breakdown will probably spend the last moments of _his _existence trying to make me care about what's happening to me._

Which he didn't. He doubted he ever would. But he _did_ care about what happened to his teammates, and he knew that without a leader they would die—probably in a long-drawn-out and painful way, too. Someone had to tell them what to do, someone had to unite Wildrider's fearlessness, Drag Strip's determination and Breakdown's loyalty instead of allowing them to pelt off in separate directions, and with an inward sigh, he supposed that someone was him.

"We'll leave," he said to Ravage with all his usual indifference and turned away, though he fully expected a missile to strike him in the back. When that didn't happen, he led the way back down the corridor and took the first turning so Ravage wouldn't see what they were going to do next. There was no need to tell Breakdown to take them to their next destination, the only other place they could go; he knew the way _there_ only too well.

None of the other Stunticons said a word as he set out for the Autobot brig. None of them needed to. Urgency, tinged with the fear he kept forcing back, raced through what remained of the gestalt link, and when Wildrider—still in alt-mode—brought up the rear as he always did, Dead End had to stop himself from glancing back over his shoulder to make sure Wildrider was still there.

The lights ahead were indication enough that they were in the right place; Megatron would have wanted the brig well-lit. Sending Wildrider and Drag Strip a quick comm to stay back, Dead End strode ahead with Breakdown just behind him and the two Decepticons looked up from the game they were playing with small marked tiles in a pattern on the floor.

Optimus Prime glanced up as well. The marks of an energy-whip showed dark across his frame—nothing lethal or even incapacitating, Dead End noted with disinterest, just enough to cause constant stinging pain. The other Autobot—Wheeljack—was in the cell across from him, seated but curled into a tight knot with his helm on his knees.

"What do you want?" one of the 'cons said. It was Dirge, but in a strange moment of déjà vu, Dead End found himself wishing he hadn't recognized Dirge either.

"We're here to relieve you," he said.

The other 'con, a Reflector component, looked suspicious. "Our shift's not finished."

_Slag_, Dead End thought, but Breakdown spoke up. "Starscream won the fight," he said, "so there's a calibration going on... he wants all the Seekers to join in." He directed a quick, nervous look at the Reflector component. "He didn't say anything about you, so I guess you could finish your shift."

He got a withering stare that made him flinch and sidestep quickly behind Dead End, while Dirge quickly collected the tiles. "_Well done,_" Dead End whispered over their internal radio as the two 'cons left. He knew how nervous Breakdown was around cameras, but if anything was stronger than that fear, it was Breakdown's loyalty towards his team.

Dirge and the Reflector component had left in the opposite direction from the one the Stunticons had arrived, so they wouldn't see Wildrider and Drag Strip, but time was still running out. The moment the clank of feet and heel-turbines had died away outside, Dead End turned to Wheeljack's cell.

"If we release you," he said quietly, "can you use your machine to take us back to our own time?"

From the corner of his visual feed he saw a faint blue glow reflecting off energon bars as Prime's optics brightened, but the only movement in the brig was the slow rise of Wheeljack's helm. When the Autobot finally looked at him, Dead End felt impatience scratching from Drag Strip's and Wildrider's side of the link, but he ignored that. _The last thing I need is to remind this Autobot that he has nothing further to lose—and, as a result, that he doesn't need us as much as _we_ need _him.

"What kind of trick are you playing now?" Wheeljack said, his voice weary and toneless.

"It's not a trick." Dead End glanced at the doorway through which Dirge and the Reflector component—_Spectro? Spyglass? Oh, what does it matter?_—had left. "Motormaster disappeared, and our gestalt link… can't find him. He doesn't exist any longer."

Wheeljack's optics flickered. It seemed to take a long time for him to reply, but when he did, the exhaustion in his voice had been pushed into the background; he spoke with the crisp precision of a scientist instead.

"In the world we came from, Megatron created you to fight us," he said. "But if there are no more Autobots, then he had no need to build you—and in this new reality you've created, he didn't. So the timeline is editing itself, erasing what's no longer relevant." His vocal indicators flared like balefire. "And that couldn't have happened to a more deserving pack of—"

"Wheeljack." Optimus Prime's voice was not loud, but Dead End would have recognized the authority in it over the roars of any crowd. He turned and met the Autobot leader's steady gaze, though he had to lower his head a little to do so. Prime's cell was too small to permit him to stand upright, and he knelt instead. A memory of Motormaster in a similar cell flitted through Dead End's mind and was gone.

"If there's a chance that we can save our friends, we'll take it," Prime said.

Wheeljack shook his head jerkily. "You can't trust them, Prime. You don't know them—you haven't seen what they—"

"And you _won't_ see us," Breakdown cut in, his voice tense and sharp as razor wire, "if you just keep arguing long enough, because we'll all get erased by the timeline. Then it's just going to be you two and the rest of the 'cons. Is that what you want?"

In the silence Wheeljack looked from him to Prime, and Dead End wondered if the Autobot leader might be ordering him—over their own secure comm channels—to cooperate. _But no, with our luck he's being heroic to the bitter end, because he probably thinks Wheeljack should have the freedom to refuse the only way out—_

"Okay."

The word was so brief a flicker of Wheeljack's vocal indicators that Dead End almost missed it, and it was nearly drowned out in the creak of stressed components as the Autobot rose to his feet. Breakdown drew his rifle and aimed at Prime's cell, while Dead End commed Wildrider and Drag Strip to join them.

"Halt, all of you!" someone snapped from the other doorway.

Dead End turned his head. The Reflector component stood there, a gun trained on them. Breakdown had frozen where he stood, but from the opposite door came a rev of engines.

"Drop your—" the Reflector component began, just as Wildrider shot through the other door like a grey comet. Dead End and Breakdown threw themselves aside instinctively—in Dead End's case, barely missing the energon bars of Prime's cell. Equally instinctively, the Reflector component fired, but one of the advantages of having a sports car as alt-mode was being low enough to the floor that the glowing bolt streaked over Wildrider's roof.

He shot again. That time, Wildrider hit his thrusters, soared over the lasers' trajectory, transformed in mid-air and crashed into him, feet first. They went down together with a crash, cursing and struggling, but Wildrider scrambled away and as the Reflector component leaped up, gun in hand, Drag Strip shot him.

Metal screamed in the twisting grip of gravitational forces. It was, Dead End thought in detachment, like watching a mech placed midway between two black holes, both of which were distorting him beyond recognition. At some point it occurred to him that the controls on Drag Strip's gun must have been pushed up to their highest level, past all safeties, but by then the red glow had gone from the Reflector component's optics. Drag Strip lowered his gun and a chunk of mangled metal clanged to the floor.

_That's it, then_, Dead End thought as Wildrider ran back to them and Drag Strip hurried in from the other side. Reflector's other two components would have sensed that at once. _The hunt is on_.

"Let's go," he said. Breakdown nodded, turned back to the Autobots' cells and fired.


	5. Ashes to Ashes

_Author's note : This title refers to a TV show._

* * *

**Chapter 5 : Ashes to Ashes**

The bars flickered and went inert. Optimus Prime grabbed them in both hands and pulled them apart, shoving his head and torso through the gap. It was hardly large enough and the metal scraped against his armor in a way that would have made Dead End wince if he had not been past feeling anything. Strips of red and blue paint peeled away.

Ignoring that—ignoring everything—Prime yanked open the bars of Wheeljack's cell too. He extended a hand, but Wheeljack didn't move, and his optics went to Dead End.

"Why did you help us?" he said, suspicion sharpening his voice. "Why didn't you just try to work the machine yourselves—or take me but leave Prime here to make sure I did as you said?"

_I wish I'd thought of that_. "We don't have time to discuss the whys and the wherefores," Dead End said. He avoided looking at the mass of twisted metal that had once been a Reflector component, though he couldn't avoid smelling the oil and energon that had spilled from lines broken by gravitational forces. "As for working the machine ourselves, we would need to reach the machine in the first place. It's in a laboratory near the command room, but the door to that laboratory is fused shut and there's a 'con on guard outside."

"You could get in through the vents." Prime's hand was still extended to Wheeljack, but now he sounded faintly curious. "This machine, Wheeljack—will it take you forward in time as well as back?"

"I don't see why not." Clearly thinking that over, Wheeljack took Prime's hand and allowed himself to be helped down from the cell. "The principle is the same, and if—"

"Can we go already?" Drag Strip said. In the distance, faint but growing closer, Dead End heard swift footfalls hammering through the Ark.

"This way," Prime said, and moved out to the corridor from which they had come. The Stunticons followed with their weapons drawn, but he stopped almost at once and pointed to a ventilation shaft high over their heads. He wrenched the heavy meshed cover from it.

Laserfire streaked through the corridor and struck him in the arm. The cover clanged to the floor and the Stunticons shot back, though in the darkness Dead End couldn't even see who they were aiming at—nothing was visible except a dozen glowing red pinpoints of optics and the firework flare of weapons discharging. Before any of those could strike home, though, Wheeljack tilted his shoulder-cannon up at the roof before them and fired.

Metal weakened over the course of four million years gave way, and rocks crashed down between them and the rest of the Decepticons. "Let 'em shoot their way through that," Wheeljack said, though Dead End couldn't help wishing he'd brought the roof down over the heads of the other 'cons instead. _Autobots_.

"Go on, Wheeljack," Prime said, his voice taut. The laserbolt had caught him in an elbow, relatively unprotected compared to the thick plating of his arms, and the joint was scorched, half-melted. He extended his other hand and Wheeljack stepped into it, put a foot on Prime's shoulder and caught the edge of the air vent.

More shots rang out behind the pile of fallen rocks, and boulders shifted, but a voice shouted for everyone to get out of the way. Dead End followed Wheeljack, though his shoulder-tires went hot with friction as they rasped against the edges of the vent, and he wondered how Prime would fit through.

_Don't be a fool. He's not going to fit through. He's going to die out there_.

Drag Strip followed, though as the smallest of the Stunticons he had no difficulty at all. The air shaft was so narrow that Dead End had to shift away from Wheeljack to give the other Stunticons room and to stay close to the vent. He didn't want to move from that spot just yet.

The barrier gave way, as rocks were scooped and pushed and lifted aside with what he knew were huge industrial shovels. _The Constructicons._ On the other side of the vent, Wheeljack seemed to have realized that Prime wouldn't be joining them. His vocal indicators flashed and he tried to shove his way back to the vent, but Drag Strip and now Breakdown were in the way.

Wilrider's spiked helm appeared, silhouetted by the little light from outside. He got both hands on the edge of the vent and pulled himself through. Dead End glanced down through the vent just as the firefight broke out again.

This time the 'cons used the rubble as cover and Prime staggered back under the fusillade. Before he could recover, they charged him. He went down so hard that Dead End felt the impact vibrate though his own plating, and the Decepticons swarmed over him, fists and piledrivers rising and falling.

Soundwave, though, glanced up at the air vent, optics glowing like hot coals, and Dead End quickly scrambled out of the way. "Drag Strip, give me your gun," he said, and when he got it, he took careful aim at the vent and fired, rotating the gun's barrel in a tight circle as he did so. The metal shrieked as it was bent and distorted to narrow the vent, through Wheeljack's cry was louder.

"Prime!" He tried to shove his way past the Stunticons again, and failed. "What's happening—"

"He's dead," Breakdown said. Dead End thought they didn't know that for sure—Megatron might well have ordered the other 'cons to keep his enemy alive—but it made no difference. Either way, they would accomplish nothing by a futile act of heroism in trying to rescue him. They had to keep moving.

"Go," he said, keeping his voice calm. He tossed the gun back to Drag Strip and the other Stunticons pushed their way down the air shaft. Wheeljack had to move or be shoved, much as it would have been on the roads, Dead End thought. He wondered if any of them would have a chance to drive again.

Their scrabbling progress through the air shaft was not only slower than Dead End would have liked, but noisy as well. Knee-joints and elbows scraped against the sides of the shaft, high-performance engines growled and from time to time someone would curse or order someone else to "get a move on before I shoot you up the tailpipe" or "stop poking me with those slagging spikes". _If all Soundwave's cassettes were stalking us through this maze, we wouldn't hear them_, Dead End thought, his mood soured even further by the fact that he was last in line and would therefore be the first target of any pursuers. He thought of activating his combat radar, but felt too dispirited to do so. If he hadn't been using the damned thing, they would never have been in that mess in the first place.

Wheeljack took a final turn and Dead End heard a different note in the tap of the Autobot's fingers against the floor—a hollow, echoing sound. Another vent cover, he knew at once, and all the other Stunticons turned on their headlights and hi-beams. Wheeljack wrestled the vent cover out of the way and set it aside, then dropped down. Dead End heard him thud into the room below, and everyone waited tensely.

When there was no sound except for the Autobot's sharp whisper of "Hurry up!" they followed, one by one. Dead End took one last glance behind him as he did so, but the air shaft was dark and empty.

He lowered his legs through the vent and let himself drop. Headlights picked out workbenches piled with tools and equipment on the floor, but across the room, Wheeljack's white plating flashed pale as he pulled a panel off the wall and turned a switch inside. Before Dead End could ask what he was doing, large bright lights came on overhead.

Wheeljack's face didn't show much expression, though his voice was taut with disgust. "Those fraggers have ransacked my lab," he said, turning around, "but all we need—"

He stopped. Dead End turned, following the line of the Autobot's gaze, and saw the time machine against a wall where they had left it, the generator to one side of it. On its other side, Skywarp leaned against the wall, a grin turning up one corner of his mouth.

"Megatron thought you might try to get at this," he said. "So long, slaggers!"

He teleported away in a flash of light, and the time machine went with him.

No one had had the time to even draw a weapon, but Dead End shook off the shock and turned on his combat radar. He knew what the Seekers' shapes, sizes and energy signatures were, and if Skywarp had teleported anywhere within two hundred miles, the radar might detect him. At first there was nothing but a blank field, but then a blip showed up just over a hundred miles away.

Not that that made Dead End feel any better. They were trapped in Wheeljack's laboratory, their only hope of escape to their own time now guarded by a 'con who would enjoy taunting them—if they somehow managed to get out and make their way to him—before teleporting away once more. His shoulders slumped.

The other Stunticons looked at him, their expressions wary and worried. "Dead End?" Breakdown said. Drag Strip and Wildrider had their guns drawn and aimed at the air vent, but they were clearly waiting for a new plan of action as well.

Dead End bit back a sigh of defeat; the others wouldn't thank him for that. "Skywarp's about a hundred and ten miles away," he said. "I have no idea how we'll reach him now, though."

"Well, that's good," Breakdown said. "Firstly, no one else is likely to be that far away when all the action is happening here. And secondly, Skywarp doesn't know that you know where he is."

Wheeljack nodded. "He's not likely to abandon the time machine out there, is he? If we can get out of here, we can track him down."

"Okay, but how do we get out?" Drag Strip said.

Something crashed against the door from outside, hard enough to dent the metal inward. Everyone jolted and backed away, except for Dead End. He stared at the dent, thinking it was almost as large as Menasor's fist and trying to work out what to do next. Obviously the 'cons were gathered outside, so how to get past them?

"Dead End, could you stop moping around and give us a fragging hand?" Drag Strip snapped.

Dead End turned, just as another impact hammered the door. The other Stunticons were pushing laboratory benches and cabinets into place to give them some cover when the laserbolts began to fly, and Wheeljack was rifling storage units, hopefully for some heavy weaponry. It looked to Dead End as though someone else had already done that for him, though.

"How much longer before that door goes down?" he said.

"It's meant to resist all but the most powerful explosions." Wheeljack turned, slotting a shell into his shoulder-mounted cannon. "But it'll give way sooner or—"

"_Stand aside_!" someone roared from outside. Even muffled by the thick door, Dead End recognized Megatron's voice, and he and Wheeljack both moved behind the workbenches. They were all doomed, but a fusion cannon blast wasn't how he had hoped to die either. At point-blank range, that was likely to melt a target down completely, which was probably why mechs called Megatron the Slag Maker. Perhaps the timeline would considerately remove his liquefied remains, though, because he didn't particularly want his Crypt marker to read "_Here lies Dead End, beloved puddle"_.

The explosion outside was muffled by the thick slab of reinforced steel that formed the door, so that Dead End heard it as a powerful, subaudial _whump_ that resonated through his plating and circuits. Then the door shattered. It turned to a shower of molten metal, and small burning drops spattered over Wheeljack's lab. Dead End heard the others gasp as they tried to brush the white-hot drops from their plating; the bite felt like acid.

He drew his knees up tightly against his chestplate and transmission, his back pressed to a cabinet that was the only thing now separating him from Megatron, and which would probably last for even less time than the door had done. The bright flicker of Wheeljack's vocal indicators caught his optics, but if the Autobot said anything, Dead End didn't hear it; his audials still rang with the afterechoes of the explosion. Smoke drifted through the lab, thicker than fog.

His comm came on. "_There's a dozen of 'em out there,_" Drag Strip said, and even though he spoke over a secure channel, his voice was a tense whisper. Dead End wondered if Soundwave was listening in. "_We can't take 'em all on at once, not if Megatron's there too…_"

"_I—I could shoot him._" The voice was barely recognizable as Breakdown's. "_But not if he's looking at me…_"

"Stunticons!" Megatron shouted from outside. "Surrender and I'll spare your lives!"

_Very magnanimous,_ Dead End thought. Megatron was no fool and had probably figured out exactly what was going on, meaning he didn't need to kill them when the timeline would do that for him. "_Wildrider_," he said over the comm, "_we need a distraction. Can you do that?_"

For the most part, that was a rhetorical question. Wildrider was the terrorist because he could always think of something that would startle, disconcert or terrify their enemies. If he could just occupy Megatron's attention for the few seconds it would take Breakdown to stand and fire—

"Wildrider?" Dead End said when there was no reply, and he turned.

Wildrider`s frame was translucent as glass, less substantial than mist. Through him, Dead End saw the look of frozen shock on Drag Strip`s face, but there was no expression at all in Wildrider`s optics as they flashed like violet sparks for the last time before they were extinguished. A thin sharp lance of terror tore through the gestalt bond from Wildrider`s side and Drag Strip lunged forward, one arm extended to grab him.

His hand passed through the empty space where Wildrider`s frame had been a moment earlier, and the stab of fear was gone from the gestalt bond as well. Wildrider had ceased to exist.

"_STUNTICONS! THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE!_"

For a moment that seemed to last for an eternity, none of the Stunticons or Wheeljack moved or spoke. And then Breakdown staggered to his feet behind a workbench, though he was hunched-over as if expecting to be shot at. Or as though a hollow pain in the center of his frame didn't permit him to stand up straight.

"I surrender," he croaked, then raised his voice to a raw, rasping shout. "I surrender!" He lurched out from behind the workbench as if the motor relays in his legs had been cut.

"No!" Wheeljack flung an arm out, but Dead End was quicker. His hand closed around Wheeljack`s wrist and held him back as Breakdown stumbled out into the open.

"That's the distraction," he whispered, so softly that he wasn't sure if Wheeljack had heard him. His next word was much louder, though, uttered in the kind of shout he hadn't known he was capable of. Ordinarily, he never bothered to raise his voice.

"Traitor!" he yelled.

Betrayal of one's leader was something Megatron could understand, and Dead End, listening tensely from behind the cover of the workbenches and cabinets, heard no sound other than the uneven clank of feet as Breakdown reached the other side of the lab. A near-paralyzing fear filled the gestalt bond, cold and numbing, and he knew Breakdown now stood before Megatron.

"G-give it up, Dead End!" Breakdown might have been trying to shout back, but his voice came out small and strengthless. "Everyone here is a Decepticon, like us… we can`t fight them…"

"That`s right." Even when Megatron wasn't shouting, his voice was powerful, commanding, full of authority. It might have made an impact if Dead End's apathy hadn`t run so deep that even in their own place and time, he had barely been able to bother with whatever Megatron wanted. "Motormaster would not have wanted you to attack your own kind, Dead End! He would have ordered you to obey me as your leader and lay down your weapons. This resistance is useless. Even if you weren't outnumbered, I could destroy this lab single-handedly."

He's right about that much, Dead End thought, we are outnumbered and he could blow this entire lab to its component atoms if he wanted to do so. He guessed Megatron didn't particularly want to destroy all the rest of the technology in the lab, nor did he want to risk detonating any chemicals or ammunition. _Push him far enough, though, and he might consider that the lesser of two evils._

"So lay down your weapons, now!" Megatron ordered.

It would have been easy to obey, from then to wait until the timeline erased them like the rain washing away a drawing on the sidewalk. As if the joints in his neck were rusted through, Dead End turned his head. There was only one Stunticon beside him now—but that was Drag Strip. Having the odds stacked high against him only made Drag Strip more fiercely determined to win. And on his other side was Wheeljack, who was now the only surviving Autobot on Earth and who still wasn`t giving in.

"I know you don't give a slag about yourself, but what about Drag Strip?" Breakdown shouted at him. The yell was so loud it almost drowned out the thrum of an engine beginning to rev—but in an unstable discordant way, as if gears ground together and slipped loose at the same time. "You want him to be deactivated while fighting our own kind?"

"So Wildrider's vanished as well?" Megatron said, his voice suddenly softer. "I didn't detect his energy signature and I wondered—"

"It doesn't matter!" Dead End shouted. His throat was starting to ache from all the yelling, but at all costs he had to cover the grating vibrations of Breakdown's engine. "If we surrender, we'll cease to exist, Megatron! Can't you _see_ that?"

"Of course I see that, you fool!" Megatron snapped. "And Motormaster saw it as well!" There was a gasp and an odd clanking sound, but Megatron continued without pause. "Motormaster was prepared to accept those consequences if it meant a glorious future for the Decepticon Empire. He knew his legacy would be one of remembrance and—"

"That's the lamest lie I've ever heard!" Drag Strip cut in. "And you call yourself a Decepticon?"

Two of the overhead lights began to flicker and one shorted out. "That's right!" Dead End shouted. "Motormaster might have sacrificed himself for your cause but he would never have condemned us to—"

"What the slag is going on?" a voice said. With the cabinets and workbenches in the way, Dead End couldn't see who it was, but it sounded like Dirge. "Lord Megatron, something's intrrfrrr…" The words died away in a strangled whine of static as the circuits in his vocalizer fritzed under the impact of Breakdown's engine vibrations. Megatron snarled wordlessly and spun on his heel.

In the instant before he could aim and fire at Breakdown, Dead End sprang up. He fired his compressed-air gun straight at Megatron.

The blast tore away the remains of the door and flung 'cons aside in all directions. Breakdown had been expecting the shot, and he threw himself to the floor just in time to avoid the worst of it. Megatron had not been expecting it, but he grabbed the ruined edge of the doorframe, the crushing grip of his fingers distorting it even further as he fought to hold his position against the gale-force wind. In the instant the surge of air faded, his right arm came up to fire.

Nothing happened. Breakdown scrambled to his feet and transformed. Drag Strip fired back, but Megatron twisted away behind the wall and avoided the shot. Dirge, on his knees, made a shaky grab for Breakdown, but the blue-and-white Lamborghini all but flew past him with an engine still howling, and electricity skittered visibly from one joint to another past blue armor as Dirge collapsed on his face.

"Come on!" Dead End transformed as well, but Drag Strip, as always, streaked out first. He was a yellow flash gone so fast that Megatron, swinging his now-useless fusion cannon like a club, missed him by a good few yards. Wheeljack's shoulder-mounted cannon fired, forcing Megatron to retreat a few steps. Then Wheeljack transformed as well, his engine roaring as he raced out of the lab after Breakdown and Drag Strip.

Dead End followed, though another 'con—he thought it was another Reflector component—fired at him as he hurtled through the doorway. His forcefield shimmered as it negated the shot, but the kinetic energy rocked him to one side, tires shrieking as he slid sideways. That saved his life, because a fusion cannon blast detonated the floor where he had been a second earlier.

For a moment Dead End's sensors registered nothing but white heat, and the only thought racing in circles through his mind was, _He recovered _that_ quickly?_ Then he recovered as well. He floored his accelerator and the numbers on his digital speedometer blurred as he raced away from the lab, faster than he had ever driven before, towards the entrance of the Ark.

* * *

Much as Drag Strip longed to be in the lead, he knew better than to get too close to Breakdown's engine. As it was, lights crackled and died in Breakdown's wake and Soundwave's dispassionate voice broadcasting their location over an intercom system was abruptly silenced as well. Drag Strip grinned to himself, though not for long. Despite the growl of high-performance engines, the shouts from behind them and the occasional shot, the race still seemed oddly quiet; there was no music blaring, no wild laughter and no thunder of eighteen wheels smashing aside anything in their path.

"_Look out!_" Breakdown screamed over the comm, and that was the only warning he got. All he saw in the darkness ahead were the twin red points of Breakdown's brake lights—like Decepticon optics in the dark. Then Breakdown's headlights flashed on a mosaic of purple and green that flew apart under the impact of nearly a ton of metal traveling at two hundred miles an hour.

The Constructicons scattered, firing back wildly. Drag Strip swerved to one side, flipping on to three wheels to avoid something flying at him—it looked like Long Haul in root-mode—and gunned his engine. He didn't dare shoot in case he hit Breakdown. If he could just dodge—

Another Constructicon loomed up ahead, bigger than he was in alt-mode. It was Mixmaster, far slower and less maneuverable than any Stunticon would have been, and he was even facing away from Drag Strip; he had clearly been trying to shoot Breakdown instead. But before Drag Strip could swerve around him and peel away, the huge mixing-drum spat oil over the floor.

Drag Strip's tires skidded. He spun away in a weaving loop, out of control, and transformed just as he slammed into the nearest wall. Even as he struggled up, shaking his head, and drew his gun, two more Constructicons stepped out of the corridor just opposite. They emptied their weapons into him.

Red warnings flashed up on Drag Strip`s HUD as his forcefield went down under the concerted assault. He staggered back against the wall. Through the flickering red in his vision he saw Wheeljack shoot past him like a bullet. In the next moment Dead End rammed into both the Constructicons, and they went down together in a tangle of flailing limbs and spinning wheels. Drag Strip gripped his gun in both hands, because his arms were still trembling with the after-effects of the crash, and brought it up to fire.

He heard a soft whir and a hook flew through the air, struck his gun and snagged it. Hook hauled on the other end of the cable, tearing the gun out of Drag Strip`s hands, and moved to block his way, standing between him and Dead End. Before Drag Strip could think what to do, Mixmaster trundled ahead, the bulky mixing-drum all but filling the narrow corridor, and the two Constructicons scrambled away from Dead End. Still in alt-mode, he reversed slowly, engine growling beneath a hood that was no longer smooth and pristine and perfect.

"Get away!" Drag Strip shouted. He didn't know if a forcefield could absorb and deflect an acid spray and he didn't want to find out. He switched to the Stunticon channel. "_Don't worry about me, just get to that machine!_"

"_Drag Strip—_" Breakdown said, but the words were cut off almost at once. _Soundwave, jamming the transmission,_ Drag Strip guessed.

With four Constructicons barring his way back, Dead End hesitated for a moment longer Then, an instant before Mixmaster's drum sprayed the corridor with a caustic that ate into walls and floor alike, he hit his accelerator and roared away in reverse.

Drag Strip threw himself forward at the Constructicons who blocked his way. He knew he could never have defeated four of them, but at the same time he couldn`t just stand there and allow them to take him prisoner. For a moment he thought he might even get away, because they hadn't been expecting the desperate lunge, and he actually knocked Scavenger down with his momentum. But the other three closed in on him, wrenching his arms away and behind his back, kicking him in the side. One of his ankle-tires burst. Drag Strip struggled and clawed and bit, but they dragged him to his feet and Bonecrusher hit him coldly, systematically, fists plowing into his midsection and chest and face until he stopped struggling and hung limply in their grip.

That was when, through the one optic he still had functional, he saw Megatron approach.

Drag Strip was almost past feeling pain in the conventional sense by then, but his whole frame went numb in fear as Megatron's measured pace covered the distance between them. In that moment he wished the Constructicons had killed him. He also wished Dead End would come back for him, though he knew that would simply result in two dead Stunticons rather than one. Somehow he forced himself to meet the burning glow of Megatron's optics, though not for long. Still gripping his arms tightly, the Constructicons forced him down to his knees.

Megatron didn`t even seem to notice him. "The others?" he said briefly, his gaze flicking to the marks of tires and acid in the corridor just ahead.

"The others escaped," Scrapper replied. "The blue-and-white one was able to temporarily disrupt our systems."

"With his engine's vibrations," Hook added.

"But we got this one." Bonecrusher gave Drag Strip's left arm a sharp twist and he bit back a gasp.

"The Seekers will find the rest of them," Megatron said, and his gaze traveled slowly down to Drag Strip as if noticing him for the first time. "Are you the one who asked me if I called myself a Decepticon?"

Drag Strip had never felt so terrified in his life, though he knew he had to answer. His internal fuel tank had been damaged by the beating, and when he tried to talk he tasted a bitter mixture of gasoline and half-processed energon choking his intake. Fuel dribbled out of his mouth, stinging, as he spoke.

"The timeline… wiping us out," he managed to say. "We just wanted to live…"

"At the cost of a Decepticon victory?" Megatron raised an optic ridge. "You would have sacrificed our continued, secure future and our return to Cybertron for a handful of newly sparked mechs?"

_Keep him here, talking,_ Drag Strip thought, _because as long as he's here, he's not after Dead End. _Even more than he longed for rescue or death, he wished he knew whether Dead End and the others would reach the time machine. He guessed they had escaped the Ark, otherwise Megatron would not have sent the Seekers after them, but he could no longer comm them to find out if they had won.

That was, he realized, something he would never know. In all his fantasies, Drag Strip was a hero—and what could be more heroic than making a defiant last stand to buy his friends time to win the race in his memory?—but he felt smaller than a human under Megatron's cold stare. He was trembling, and he couldn't think of anything to say that might save his life, much less stall for time.

He didn't dare tap into the gestalt link either, because if what he felt through it was raw terror as the Seekers descended, or the knowledge of certain failure…

"Whoever brought you self-absorbed cowards into existence, it was not me." Megatron put the barrel of his fusion cannon just beneath Drag Strip's chin, forcing him to tilt his head up, then drew his hand back a little. "Perhaps you'll find your real maker in the Pit."

He pushed the mouth of the cannon against Drag Strip's face and fired.


	6. The Butterfly Effect

**Chapter 6: The Butterfly Effect**

"_Skywarp, this is Starscream. They're heading for you."_

Finally, some action! Skywarp sat up abruptly, battle subroutines activating as he checked his weaponry. The Stunticons were nowhere in sight yet, much to his disappointment, but the prospect of a fight was infinitely better than sitting on a boring hill next to a boring machine, all by himself.

"_Watch out for the blue and white one_," Starscream said. "_He can cause mechanical failures if he's close enough._"

Well, that should make it even more interesting. Skywarp wasn't too worried; no one could ever get that close to a mech who could teleport. "_You guys on the way as well?_" he said, hoping he could get to take out at least one or two of the traitors before Starscream swooped down to claim all the credit.

"_Yes, so make certain you follow my orders!_" Starscream said. Primus, there was no one like Starscream when it came to going on and on and on. _"Use the machine to lure them all in, but under no circumstances will you allow any of them to blah blah, blah blah. Blah blah! Blah?_"

"_Blah!_" Skywarp replied. "_I mean, yeah, sure, whatever you say_. _Skywarp out_." He heard Thundercracker chuckle before he cut the comm, and grinned to himself as he finished checking his fuel levels. A bit low after four million years—and he hadn't had a chance to get any energon yet—but his position allowed him to see whatever was coming for miles around, so he could stay there unless it was at all necessary to teleport out. Flight systems in order, warp mod ready to go, weapons primed. _Come on, Stunticons, let's see what you got_.

He didn't have to wait long. Two specks appeared on the horizon, plunging off the highway to all but bounce over the uneven ground. Skywarp felt sure they had been lying about Megatron creating them, and their alt-modes were proof enough of that. Why would Megatron have ever built groundpounders? Decepticons were flyers, everyone knew that. If Megatron had wanted another combiner team, he'd have made them jets. Sleek pretty jets, who knew their rightful place in the army and who had the proper amount of respect for the Seekers who outranked them and who'd been flying for millions of years, but who wouldn't mind showing them a trick or two in the sky. _Or the berth_…

Skywarp brought his thoughts back to the present situation—not without some reluctance, because the image of a team of newly-sparked jets looking at him with lust and hero-worship was quite appealing—and watched the two cars that were driving towards him. He'd spotted them when they were over a mile away, but they were closing the distance fast—

_Wait, two? Where's the third one?_

He kept his guns trained on them, frowning as he wondered what had happened. Had another of them gone the way of their leader? Although the cars kicked up a cloud of dust and smoke, he could see them clearly—one was dark-red, with a 'con insignia that he didn't have the right to wear, according to Megatron. The other was red-and-white, and sported an Autobot emblem.

The blue-and-white, the one Starscream had warned him about, was missing.

The other two cars braked, tires biting into soft ground as they fought to halt their progress. Skywarp crouched behind the time machine for good measure, his arms braced on its upper surface and guns still poised to fire; he felt sure neither of the groundpounders would risk damaging the machine to get at him. And no matter what their speed, he would always be able to teleport away much faster. He just needed to find out if the blue-and-white had been erased as well first.

The two mechs transformed, standing perhaps thirty yards away from him, and brought their empty hands up slowly. "Skywarp," Dead End called, "if you want a prisoner, take either of us. We won't fight."

"We just want that machine," the Autobot said.

_Slag, how dumb do they think I am?_ Skywarp didn't even want to imagine what Megatron would have done had he made such a disadvantageous trade. "Where's the other one?" he said.

"He vanished." Dead End's voice was toneless and hollow; Soundwave would have spoken with more expression. "We're dying, one by one, and if you don't let us go back to our own time—"

"Isn't that what you want to do to _us_?" Skywarp snapped. "If I let you at this machine, next thing I know we'll all be dead or have lost the war or—"

"'_Warp, look out!_" Thundercracker shouted over a Seeker channel.

Skywarp reacted instantly. Both guns fired. One laserbolt shimmered off a forcefield, but the other punched through white plating, sending the 'bot sprawling. Still keeping the time machine at his back, Skywarp twisted around and fired again at the 'bot he knew would be trying to sneak up on him from behind.

Except… no one was there. The other side of the hill was bare and empty, except for a rock or two glowing red-hot where his gunfire had struck it. Bewildered, Skywarp looked around; where was the slagger?

A moment later, he realized that while he had been quite right about the traitors being groundpounders, he'd forgotten that they were still Decepticons. And all Decepticons could fly.

What felt like a meteor crashed down, striking Skywarp's left arm and wing. The wing crumpled like paper. For a moment nothing registered but pain so complete that he couldn't even scream, but reflexes took over almost at once. He teleported away, remembering at the last instant to only bend space a few mechanometers, and his good arm came up even as he materialized again. The gun on his left arm was bent almost in two from the groundpounder's weight and momentum, but there was nothing wrong with the gun on the right.

The groundpounder hadn't fared too well from the crash either. His plating was battered and dented, one fender-panel crushed beyond use and broken lines leaking, but he struggled up to his hands and knees. Purple optics fixed on Skywarp, wide and terrified.

Behind him was the time machine, but Skywarp couldn't have cared less about that at the moment. He emptied the full charge of his gun into the mech's chest.

The blast picked the mech off his feet and sent him rolling in a ungainly heap to the foot of the hill. He was still alive, somehow, twitching and gasping, but before Skywarp could remedy that the other Stunticon lurched up on the other side of the time machine. Nothing could be seen of his face behind a mask and visor, but his hands opened and closed spasmodically.

"You shouldn't have done that," he said.

Skywarp cut off all the receptor feed from his left arm and wing, clearing his HUD of damage warnings and giving him a chance to think. _Can't transform_. And the other Stunticon was closer to the time machine than he was now. But he could still teleport, and if he appeared _behind_ the Stunticon, got the drop on him—

The _thrmm_ of a weapon charging came from behind him. Skywarp whirled around, his arm flung up reflexively, but the Autobot's shoulder-cannon fired first.

The shell punched through his chest, tore out one of his air intakes and exploded against his laser-core.

Skywarp dropped to his knees. His mouth was open, though he couldn't hear himself making any sounds—and he didn't need to, since he felt no pain at all. Only a kind of stunned bewilderment, because he knew his chest was open too. He could feel that. How was he going to fly with his chest blasted open?

"_Skywarp!_"

Who had shouted that? He couldn't tell whether it had been Thundercracker's deep voice or Starscream's shrill tones, or perhaps it had been both of them. He tipped his head up to see his wingmates. So high above him, so small in a sky full of white. The sky tilted and he realized he was falling.

He didn't have far to drop. He lay flat on the ground—nothing in his frame seemed to be working except for his visual feed—and stared up at the sky. Nothing else in all the world.

"_Skywarp…_"

So far away, that sound, as distant as the specks in the endless white. And then they were gone as well.

Everything was gone.

* * *

Drag Strip's death had felt like a limb being wrenched off—which, Dead End supposed bleakly, it _was_—but when Breakdown crumpled and fell, the spillover shock flooded his entire frame and scrambled his thought processes. It was as though the gestalt link was even more concentrated now that it was confined to the dimensions of only two mechs. All he registered was pain and terror, and in that moment Skywarp could easily have finished him off as well.

Except Wheeljack fired first. Dead End didn't bother even looking to see how badly Skywarp was damaged. Breakdown was all that mattered, the last mech who was his responsibility, his sole surviving teammate lying in a spreading pool of oil and energon fifty feet away. He was battered, smoke rising from seams and joints, his beautiful paintjob ruined, but he was still alive. Online. The gestalt link told Dead End that. He hurried around the time machine, intending to head down the slope to help Breakdown back up.

The Seekers got there first. Or rather, their missiles did. Dead End heard a whistling sound so high-pitched it was almost out of range of his auditory spectrum, and then his battle computer took over, reflexively jerking him back and flinging him flat on his face. Something flew past him—for a moment he thought it was one of the Seekers crashing—and then the explosion shattered the rest of the gestalt link. In a distant corner of his mind Dead End knew his forcefield had absorbed all it could of the blast and gone down, he felt his paint blistering from the heat, he sensed the impact tremors thudding through him, but the raw emptiness where Breakdown had been was far worse.

The world itself had vanished in a cloud of smoke, though, cutting him off from the Seekers' view for a few seconds. Dead End staggered up. Through the ringing in his audials, he heard the roar of jet engines swooping overhead. His gun was in his hands, though he couldn't remember drawing it, and he fired above him, then turned and clambered gracelessly back to the time machine.

Wheeljack had reached it first. For a moment Dead End thought the Autobot would simply leave without him, but Wheeljack was waiting, hand poised on the lever. "Hurry!" he shouted to be heard over the thunder as more Decepticons converged on their position. "Proximity detector… if anyone's close at hand, the machine won't come with us…"

Dead End stumbled the last few steps to the time machine and Wheeljack pulled the lever. The blue portal sprang up. Wheeljack turned, fired at a 'con who was loping up to them—Dead End thought it might be Rumble or Frenzy, judging from the size—and sprang through the portal as the 'con was flung well out of range by the shot.

Dead End took one last look at the spot where Breakdown had been, though he could see nothing through the smoke and he knew nothing would be left of Breakdown anyway. His team was gone, and the world he knew was gone with them.

But colder and sharper-edged than the loneliness and despair was the certain knowledge of what would happen to him if he didn't act. He was the only remaining Stunticon, the only traitor left to the Decepticons. Everything _they_ had lost, they would take out on him.

Dead End was an apathetic fatalist who expected to die at any given time, but he didn't particularly look forward to being tortured along the way. And so he stepped through the portal as well.

It was like opening a door to a quiet autumn morning. Dead End glanced behind him, automatically, but there was no sign at all of the fierce battle they had escaped from. Something touched his right shoulder and he flinched, turning quickly in that direction, but it was only a falling leaf.

Wheeljack looked far worse than he did. Skywarp's shot had hit his shoulder, half-melting the joint and breaking an oil line. Dead End knew at once that the Autobot would not be able to drive… and they were still on the slope of the hill where Skywarp had been waiting with the time machine, what felt like a long time ago.

_It _was _a long time ago_. Two years in the past and it might as well have been two million. The countryside around him seemed very quiet and undisturbed compared to what had happened in the past.

"Right," Wheeljack said, straightening up with what looked like an effort. "We're in the future, not the exact time you came from but an hour prior…"

He stopped as a high-performance engine revved, close by but out of sight. Dead End glanced down and realized he was standing on a road—in the two years since the battle, grass had sprung up over burned ground and a road had been built. Before he could get off it, the car drove around the side of the hill and braked to a screeching halt before him.

It was nothing but a human vehicle, nonsentient and mindless, but it was a sleek red sports car with dark-tinted windows and wheel-wells picked out in yellow, like an odd combination of his paintjob and Drag Strip's. That held Dead End motionless for a moment, and in the sudden silence, the human driving the car flung open the door, scrambling out. It was a female, and Dead End expected her to run, but she closed the door and dropped to her knees in the road before him.

"Oh, my God," she said. "I'm so sorry."

Dead End looked at Wheeljack, confused, but the Autobot's mask gave nothing away, and the vocal indicators didn't even flicker. "Sorry for…?" he began cautiously. It wasn't as though she had crashed into him or scratched his paintwork.

"For… for being in your way, sir. Is there anything I can do for you?" Her gaze was fixed, not on his face, but on his arm just to one side of the shoulder-wheel, where the Decepticon insignia was painted. And Dead End understood.

"No," he said abruptly. "Go about your business."

"Thank you, sir." The relief in her voice was palpable. She dipped her head respectfully, got back in her car and reversed—then kept driving in reverse. Dead End wasn't sure if that was because he was still blocking the road or if she wanted to keep him in her line of sight at all times, or both, but before he could think what to do next Wheeljack's vents hitched in a sharp ragged sound.

"It's a future where the Decepticons control this planet," he said.

"Yes," Dead End said dryly. "I'd figured that out."

He didn't think there were any Decepticons still left on Earth, though, unless they had been unfortunate enough to displease Megatron. It occurred to him that if not for the disturbing little detail about not existing, this would have been the Stunticons' dream—to be left to run the planet as they saw fit after everyone else had gone back to Cybertron. _Motormaster even asked Megatron for this, specifically._

It would have been perfect if his team had only been there. Now, it was just another facet of the nightmare, and even if there was no 'con presence on Earth at the moment besides himself, he supposed the timeline would soon do what the Seekers had not.

"All right," Wheeljack said, clearly thinking aloud. "We're in a different future now because your actions in the past created this. That means the timeline diverged at that particular moment in the past. Instead of going forward, we need to go back, beyond the point where the divergence occurred, and make sure it doesn't happen." He turned back to the machine, the fingers of his good hand moving with expert speed over the control panel.

Dead End said nothing as he considered what they would do once they returned to the past. He could intercept the other Stunticons, certainly, but Motormaster was likely to take him for an imposter (especially if he was accompanied by an Autobot) and simply run him over. Before he could say that, though, the blue portal sprang up and Wheeljack all but leaped into it. Dead End sighed and followed.

It seemed to have made no difference, because he stepped out on the same hillside and the landscape hadn't changed significantly other than the trees being green again. _We're back in the past, only a hundred miles or so from the Ark_, he thought and activated his combat radar.

All his internal components seemed to jolt within his frame. Five blips made their way along the screen, still a long distance away but five, living and complete and whole—

"My team," he said aloud, involuntarily.

Wheeljack threw him a single sharp look. "Right. They're heading for the Ark. And we have to stop them."


	7. Judgment Day

_Author's note : Thanks to everyone who's been leaving reviews… it means a lot to me that people aren't just reading this fic but are letting me know if they like it! Feedback is always appreciated.  
_

* * *

**Chapter 7 : Judgment Day**

"Wheeljack," Dead End said, and the Autobot glanced back at him. It was the first time Dead End had addressed him by name. "What are you going to do?"

Wheeljack turned back around. He was carrying the time machine's power generator balanced on his shoulder-cannon and steadied by his good arm, while Dead End lugged the machine itself—which seemed to be growing heavier with each mechanometer. "Wait and see," he said.

The two of them were trudging towards the Ark, and Dead End supposed dismally that Wheeljack wanted to set up an ambush for the other Stunticons inside, to stop them before they ever managed to reach the Autobots. If so, he would be doing it without Dead End's help. There were no circumstances under which Dead End could even imagine himself firing on another Stunticon.

He felt as unlikely to succeed in persuading Motormaster not to carry out his plan. "Don't kill the Autobots because we'll start disappearing too?" Dead End could hear him replying. "Then what the frag are we supposed to do? Just turn around, go back and let them all wake up so they can keep trying to defeat Megatron?"

But when he said so, Wheeljack shook his head. "You won't be engaging them… in fact, I'd like to keep you as far away from them as possible. The timeline won't allow two versions of the same mech to occupy the same space and time for long. Didn't you see what happened to… what happened to the Wheeljack from the past when you lot broke into the Ark?"

Dead End started to say they hadn't exactly broken in, given that the Ark seemed to have no doors to speak of, but stopped when he remembered that he had tried his best _not_ to look at any of the Autobots, not wanting to recognize them as they deactivated one by one. They were just outside the Ark by then, though, and Wheeljack lowered the power generator to the ground.

"Are they close?" he said.

Dead End's combat radar told him the other Stunticons were en route. "They'll be here in about a quarter of an hour."

"That gives us enough time," Wheeljack said. "Stand back."

He aimed his cannon at the ground, directly before the entrance of the Ark, and fired twice. Even before the echoes could die away, he was kneeling beside the time machine, flicking open an access panel. His good hand moved over switches and circuits inside almost too fast for Dead End to see, and once he was done he straightened up and turned. Smoke drifted up from the point where he had fired into the ground, but the grey haze was already dissipating and when Dead End saw the trench in the ground he understood.

He helped Wheeljack widen the fissure just enough to fit the time machine into it, and for the first time he didn't care that the paint over his hands was scraped away and charred. Working fast, the two of them piled rocks back over the machine and filled in the gaps with handfuls of gravel, making the surface as smooth as possible.

"What does it look like?" Wheeljack said when they were done, when the Stunticons were only minutes away.

Dead End dusted off his hands, which felt raw and abraded. "It looks as though we buried something there." He could only hope the other Stunticons would be driving too fast to notice, though for once he didn't think that would be too much to hope for. "How will you activate it?"

"It's pre-programmed now," Wheeljack said. "Get out of sight but stay within range of the machine so that doesn't leave as well."

They found hiding places behind huge boulders just as the cloud of dust appeared in the distance, and Dead End tried not to think of the possibility of the other Dead End spotting them from miles away thanks to combat radar. _But why would he/I bother to use it? In the past, with no enemies but ourselves?_

They were in sight now. Part of Dead End longed to join them, to be whole again. A more sane part told him to stay the frag out of Motormaster's sight. He pressed against the side of the boulder Megatron had sat on, during the fight, and listened thirstily to the sound of engines and tires. _Wait a moment…_

"_Where will they go?_" he said over the comm to Wheeljack.

There was no reply.

"_Where are you sending them?_"

The growl of engines rose to a crescendo as the Stunticons drove to the Ark's entrance. And the blue portal shimmered before them.

It was thin and barely substantial, but it swallowed Motormaster up without a trace as it had done before. Drag Strip and Breakdown both slammed their brakes, but they were going too fast to stop. Dead End saw the dark-red Porsche try to swerve out of the portal's path, only to have Wildrider shout, "Whoa, what the _frag—" _and twist violently sideways, so that the Ferrari crashed into him. The Porsche vanished into the sheen of blue, but Wildrider missed it by bare inches. He skidded out of the way, flinging up a spurt of dust as he came to a halt and transformed. Nothing remained but tire-tracks to show where his team had once been.

Wildrider stared around. His optics were blank as purple glass, his mouth open as if he was screaming silently and would never stop.

"What did you do?" No longer bothering to use his radio—or even lower his voice—Dead End turned to Wheeljack. "What did you do to the rest of them?"

"Shut up, he'll hear—"

_He can't hear anything_, Dead End thought. He knew exactly what he was seeing on Wildrider's face—the shock and horror of losing an entire gestalt in an instant.

"How did you kill them?" he said, and his voice was completely calm again as he understood what had just happened. _He watched Motormaster—he watched all of us—kill his friends. Of course he would feel no compunctions about paying us back in kind. Especially if he rationalized that it was to defend the sanctity of the timeline._

Wildrider stumbled forward towards the portal, fell on one knee and caught himself, grey fingers digging into the ground—into the tire-tracks—as if the sky would wrench him away were he not holding on tightly enough. Even over the thrum of his own engine and the rasp of air through his vents, Dead End heard raw broken sounds, _uh-uh-uh_, as if the sudden devastating loss had left Wildrider completely inarticulate. He tore his attention away from Wildrider with an effort and stared at Wheeljack.

"You wouldn't have sent them to the future," he said steadily, facing the truth as only he could, because alone among his team he had _always_ expected the bleakest, most shattering outcomes for them. "You couldn't risk that, because in this reality Motormaster was carrying a time machine too. If you just sent him a few years—or even a few thousand years—into the future, he could have used it to bring them all back. So you had to destroy the machine."

Wheeljack said nothing. His gaze, blue as the portal, darted from Dead End to Wildrider and back to Dead End.

"You sent them to the past instead," Dead End went on. "Four _billion_ years into the past, perhaps, when this was nothing but a sea of boiling lava? Where they and that machine would be melted down almost immediately, before they had the chance to—"

"Dead End," Wheeljack said quietly. "I had no choice."

_Neither did we. Neither did any of us. If I had known you would trick my team into dying together in a planetwide smelting pit, dying in agony, I would have—_

Some sound—a soft, scrabbling movement—made him turn his head. Wildrider had all but dragged himself over the ground towards the blue portal that still cut the air like a sheet of steel. The look in his optics was dazed, almost mindless, and he didn't even seem to see the portal as he wrenched one trembling hand away from the ground. His fingers vanished into the portal's surface.

"_No!_" Dead End shouted and lurched up from his hiding-place.

Wildrider jerked away from the portal, turning reflexively to the source of the sound. He stared at Dead End, optics completely blank, and suddenly Dead End knew he had made another mistake.

"Dead…" Wildrider laughed, and there was nothing even remotely sane in the sound. It made Dead End feel as though he had swallowed liquid lead. Wildrider shook his helm, still chuckling, and turned back to the portal. "Yeah, he _is_ dead," he said, as if answering a question the portal had asked him.

"Wildrider," Dead End said steadily, even as every instinct began to whisper that he was on more dangerous ground than if he had faced Motormaster. "Wildrider, look at me. You're not seeing things. You're _not_ having another episode."

"Dead End!" Wheeljack's voice was harsh with emphasis, but still quiet, and he pressed himself almost flat against the massive boulder that lay between him and Wildrider. "If you want to get the rest of your team back, we have to go into the future—_our_ future, the original one that we've now ensured exists. Wildrider can't help you do that."

"So what do you expect me to do?" Dead End whispered. "Kill him?"

"Are you talking to that rock?" Wildrider said. "See, that's how I know none of this is real. Dead End doesn't talk to rocks unless they're really shiny and he can see himself in them."

Dead End looked back at him. "Wildrider, listen to me. I need to explain something to you."

"As if he'll listen," Wheeljack muttered.

"Be quiet," Dead End said, struggling to keep his voice as calm as always. "This is between us, not you."

"What's going on?" The brittle amusement was wiped off Wildrider's faceplate as though it had never existed. "You can't be real, because I saw you go through _that_ and then you died. I felt it! Are you a ghost? Or are you just in my head and nowhere else? But then why can't I imagine something better, like the rest of us still being alive, all of us together? What the frag's going on?"

Before Dead End could do or say anything, Wildrider clenched a fist and drove it into the side of his own forehead. The blow was so hard that it made him stagger back, and Dead End's own helm seemed to ring from the impact. Wheeljack's frame jolted, as though he had almost leaped out from cover but had held himself back with an effort of will. Wildrider lowered his fist, optics flashing in random flickers of purple light, a deep dent on his helm.

"You're still there, dead Dead End," he whispered. "But you won't be." He drew his scattershot gun.

Dead End froze, but only for a moment. "Put that away," he said. He wanted to speak with the confident, effortless authority of someone who knew his orders would be obeyed without question, but his voice came out quiet and subdued instead. His only consolation was that none of his fear showed in it either. "You've never shot another Stunticon in your life, Wildrider, and you're not going to start now."

"Maybe not." Wildrider's mouth twisted in something that might have been a grimace or a grin. "But I can shoot _that_."

He fired at the boulder that was the only thing between him and Wheeljack. The rock glowed red-hot and exploded in the next instant. Dead End flung himself aside, sprawling with his arms over his helm, and gasping as chunks of burning stone hit him, sharp as shrapnel. When he heard Wildrider snap off another shot, though, he turned over, dreading what he was going to see next even though he half-expected it.

Wheeljack lay face-down, twitching in jerky, uncoordinated spasms. Dead End knew at once what had happened; the Autobot hadn't had the chance to get clear and while he had been disoriented from the blast, Wildrider had shot him. The white plating was dented and charred from the impact of a dozen fist-sized pieces of broken rock, but the dark holes in the Autobot's back were what had done the real damage. Wildrider's scattershot lasers had drilled cleanly through the Autobot's armor in nanoseconds, probably severing motor relays to the rest of his body, if not snapping the spinal strut itself.

But he was still alive.

"Stop!" Dead End shouted, and even as Wildrider's attention jerked to him, he scrambled up. Two strides—ignoring the smoking chunks of stone that scraped his feet—and he all but collapsed across Wheeljack, shielding the Autobot as best he could. "He built that machine, Wildrider! He can get us back—"

"I kind of hoped you were talking to them." Wildrider's voice was wistful. "To Drag Strip and Breakdown and the boss, like maybe they were playing hide-and-go-seek… even though that rock wasn't really big enough for all three of 'em. But it was an Autobot." He grinned. "Are you an Autobot too?"

"Wildrider…" Dead End had never felt so despairing, or so alone. He dared to glance down at Wheeljack, who was whimpering softly, vocal indicators flickering in random bursts of light. Around him, the sand was growing damp in a slowly spreading circle, glistening with oil and energon.

"_Are you?_" Wildrider screamed, startling Dead End so badly that he nearly dropped flat again. _Primus_, he thought, though he had never called on a god before, _what do I do now?_ Wildrider's gun was still trained on him, which didn't help his thought processes any. He could try to use the gestalt bond—what was left of it—to reach out to Wildrider, but what if Wildrider's madness spilled out through it to infect him as well?

"No, I'm not an Autobot," he said steadily, wishing he could think of what to do. "I'm a Stunticon, your teammate. I'm Dead End."

"All righty then," Wildrider said and flung his gun away.

Stunned at how easy that had been, Dead End glanced reflexively in the direction of the gun—which, he realized a moment later, was exactly what Wildrider had wanted him to do. Before he could look back, over a ton of grey metal slammed into him. The impact turned his vision white and knocked him off Wheeljack's prone body; he landed on the ground in a heap and lay there, dazed, before a single choked scream made him turn his head.

By then it was far too late. Wheeljack's torso dropped limply to the ground, his plating already starting to grey. His head had been twisted almost a hundred and eighty degrees on his neck, so his optics stared sightlessly into the distance. Wildrider released his stranglehold on the dead Autobot and got to his feet.

"You're next," he said to Dead End, "unless you get me my team back."

For a moment Dead End couldn't reply. Damage reports scrolled through his vision and his frame ached in a dozen places, but neither seemed as close or as horrifying as the change in Wildrider. His teammate was crazy, yes, but not murderous; Wildrider would cheerfully have shot any Autobot in battle, but once they were seriously damaged, unable to fight back, he would have left them alone. There would simply have been no fun in it for him any longer. Most of all, he would never have hurt another Stunticon.

_But now… now it's either him or me._

"All right," Dead End heard himself say. "I'll do it."

Ignoring Wheeljack's remains, he walked a careful circle around Wildrider and approached the blue portal. Wildrider kept a careful distance as Dead End knelt on the ground, close to the shimmering blue nothingness and the death that waited just beyond it. _Like the surface of a pool of what looks like water, except it's actually nitric acid,_ he thought as he began to scoop pebbles and haul rocks away.

There was no rush. Neither of them was going anywhere. Since the Autobots were all still alive, Dead End was no longer running from his inevitable destruction by the timeline… he was just trying to avoid being murdered by his own teammate. _The irony_, he thought as he laboriously unearthed the time machine and pulled the lever down to deactivate the portal.

Wildrider had used the opportunity to retrieve his gun, and he came closer at once. "Now get them back," he said, and Dead End had to force himself to ignore the eagerness in the words.

He glanced at the generator, noticing that the needle on the display there was in the yellow zone. Not surprising, given the amount of energy it must have taken to send so many mechs so many billions of years into the past. But he didn't need much power for his next destination. He flipped open the control panel and keyed in the new date.

"What are you entering?" Wildrider said suspiciously, and came that much nearer to see.

"The end of the year nineteen eighty-five," Dead End said, and closed the panel again. He looked up at Wildrider, who was so close now, just an arm's-length away, although the gun was still pointed at him. "Your team was brought online at that time, was it not? So they'll still be alive when you go back." He pushed the lever and the portal flashed up like a blue flame.

Wildrider paused, optics going from Dead End to the engines of the Ark that protruded from the side of the volcano. "Yeah, but—"

Before he could finish that, Dead End lunged forward. Still in a crouched position, he clamped his arms tightly around Wildrider's knees and flung his whole weight sideways. Wildrider yelled wordlessly and fired, but his aim was off and Dead End felt the air scorch bare inches from his helm. Then Wildrider's center of gravity shifted with his own, Wildrider lost his balance—

-and they toppled through the blue haze together.

A litany of _Please, please… _ran through Dead End's mind for the few, endless seconds it took for them to pass through nothingness and fall into the future. His shoulder struck mercifully solid ground and he tried to roll away before Wildrider's weight could come down on him. The attempt wasn't successful, but his plan worked anyway. Wildrider snarled in rage and shoved the muzzle of his gun against Dead End's helm, but before he could fire, a laser-bolt struck his arm, jolting it to one side. He sprang up, grabbing the gun with his good hand.

Setting the time machine for late nineteen-eighty-five had seemed to Dead End like a good way to gamble on there being an Autobot or two outside their ship, perhaps on patrol duty or combat maneuvers. _Or, knowing the Autobots, entertaining humans and playing games. _Of course, he wasn't so fortunate, and what looked like half the Autobot army was driving out from the Ark. They screeched to a halt as they recognized two Stunticons. The ones in the front skidded out of the way and transformed.

Wildrider shot at them, and it was the last thing he ever did. A dozen guns spat white heat at him, a concentrated blast that took down his forcefield. Dead End rolled over to his hands and knees. Just behind him, he heard someone from the Autobot side shouting an order to hold their fire, but it was already too late. The explosion that followed was the sound of an internal gas tank and an energon supply combusting simultaneously.

Dead End winced as pieces of smoldering metal, grey where they weren't red-hot, hit his back and helm. He yanked open the time machine's control panel. A purple optic, still trailing a few wires, struck the side of the power generator with a _plink_.

"Stunticon!" A shout rang out from the Autobot ranks. "Turn around and keep your hands where we can see 'em!"

Dead End jabbed at the keypad to enter a date—any date that would take him far away from the Ark as it was—and heard a weapon's discharge. He jerked to one side reflexively. The shot struck the control panel, shattered the digital display and turned the keypad to smoking slag.

_That…_

Dead End felt as though he had been shot himself. _That… couldn't have just happened. _He stared at the wreck of the machine's controls, and remembered that Wheeljack, the 'bot who had built the damned thing in the first place, was dead.

_What in the Pit am I going to do now? _He didn't know if the machine would accept the date he had managed to enter. For that matter, he wasn't even sure what date he had entered—he'd been punching numbers in desperate haste rather than thoughtful calculation.

"Turn around, Stunticon, or we'll shoot!"

Slowly, Dead End turned, lifting his empty hands. The Autobots faced him, some taking cover behind rocks and boulders, one perched up on the engines of the ship. The boldest ones hadn't even bothered with that and simply crouched in the road, guns trained on him. Dead End kept raising his hands—but he bent one knee as well, feeling behind him with his foot for the lever that controlled the portal.

"Lie down on your face!" one of the Autobots shouted. Dead End could barely recognize any of them at that point and wasn't particularly interested in doing so. His foot touched the lever. He swung his leg down as hard as he could, deactivating the portal that led to the past, then kicked up so that his heel struck the lever and wrenched it up again. The Autobots fired just as he threw himself backwards, blindly—and fell through a blue sheen.

He hit the ground painfully, helm first, and simply lay there, too exhausted and damaged to care. _If I'm still in the here-and-now they can kill me. It doesn't matter. _He heard guns snapping off shots, muffled explosions and shouts of alarm and rage. _I thought so. Well, go ahead and get it over with._

Nothing happened.

After a while, perplexity overcame even apathy; it was one thing to be wiped out in a hail of laserbolts and quite another to stare up at the sky while the Autobots inconsiderately kept him waiting. Dead End levered himself up on one elbow, wondering what they were doing that was evidently _so_ more important than finishing him off.

In the distance, a battle was raging.

For a long moment Dead End simply stared, because although he had been involved in plenty of skirmishes and firefights, what he was seeing looked more like… _ a siege_, he thought. In the few seconds it had taken him to fall through the portal, a city had sprung up from bare ground, and gun turrets were firing on a small army of attacking Decepticons. The smoke and brilliant flashes of explosions hid their forms, but Dead End's combat radar seemed to be active to the bitter end and it picked up Megatron, Soundwave… _everyone except us, of course_.

Then Devastator's massive form loomed up over the chaos, and Dead End didn't need radar to make _him_ out. An empty ache opened up in his chest. Seeing an intact gestalt reminded him so badly of his own team, the parts of himself he would never see again. He looked at the ground, involuntarily, but of course even Wildrider's remains had vanished.

_I can't stay here_.

He knew that already. Even with the time machine damaged, if not actually broken, what could he do—drive into a battlefield to offer Megatron his support? If Megatron remembered him at all, would the gathered 'cons be likely to destroy him? Dead End had just escaped deactivation _en masse_ from the Autobots, and was unenthusiastic about submitting to it from his own side. And if Megatron didn't remember him… _well, why bother? I've been through that as well, already. It would just be déjà vu._

Raw electricity sparked and flickered as one of the Insecticons dived into the melee, but Dead End turned away without interest and looked at the time machine. That was an even less pleasant sight, though. The dial on the power generator showed a needle in the red zone, and the control panel was blasted. With no real hope, Dead End reached for the lever and pulled it, watching the portal flicker into nonexistence.

As if tossing a coin that he knew was double-tailed, tossing it for the twentieth or hundredth time, he slid the lever up again. The portal materialized. Dead End stared into it, seeing nothing, seeing his team and wishing he could be with them. He might still be alive, he might have escaped the relentless consequences of what Motormaster had done, but what was the point when he was alone? He hadn't even managed to save Wildrider at the end.

_I killed him instead. _Oh, he hadn't actually fired a weapon, but he'd lured Wildrider into a situation where he'd known Wildrider would die… was that any better than what Wheeljack had done to his team? In that moment Dead End hated himself. He watched his hand tighten into a fist on the lever and thought, _Let's just finish this off. I have no idea what lies on the other side of that damned portal and it doesn't matter anyway._

He pulled himself to his feet with an effort and stepped through the portal.

* * *

_Author's note: And that's why the Stunticons weren't at the Battle of Autobot City. :)_


	8. Back to the Future

**Chapter 8: Back to the Future**

_This is how the world ends,_

_Not with a bang, but a whimper. - T. S. Eliot_

* * *

Dead End stepped through the open blue doorway and into a void.

For a moment he was disoriented by the darkness, and then his optical system switched automatically to the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Simultaneously, a line of tiny white lights blinked on overhead.

Dead End looked up automatically. His optical feed reverted to visible light and he saw that he stood in a long, featureless corridor. Behind him was the time machine, the blue portal still projecting from its upper surface. He pushed the lever to turn that off, not because he cared when or where he was going, but because the portal blocked his view of what lay beyond it.

The passageway on the machine's other side was just as empty except for a single large sign on the wall.

WARNYNG

RESTRYKTED AREA

Dead End stared at it, bewildered. The corridor was easily enough for a mech his height to stand upright, which meant it must have been built by Cybertronians, but the sign was in a human language. _Semi-human, anyway_, he thought, _with that garbled spelling. _Even Breakdown didn't make so many errors.

The unfamiliar surroundings had provided a brief distraction, but that ended with the thought of Breakdown. Dead End felt his knee-joints bend and his frame slide slowly down until he half-sat and half-slumped against the wall. He had a strange suspicion that there were hundreds of tons of _something _above him, as though the corridor was actually an underground tunnel, but that was nothing compared to the weight that pressed down on his mind. Knowing he was only seconds away from giving in to despair completely and for the final time, he raised his head with an effort and looked around, hoping to see something, anything, which would pull him out of that.

The sign on the wall had changed. Now it said:

SEKURETY BREACH

INTRUDER DETEKTED

Dead End stiffened. He activated his combat radar, but everything outside his immediate radius was an unclear smudge. He wasn't sure exactly what would happen next, but he was sure he didn't want to stay to find out.

The power generator's needle was far in the red zone, though. Dead End was no engineer, but he prised off a side panel of the generator, more by brute force than by skill, and drew out two leads that looked vaguely familiar. _Power cables_? he thought, and tested that theory by plugging them into an emergency access port in his leg.

The sudden power drain made a warning flash up in his HUD. Dead End yanked the leads out with no grace but much speed. He had a feeling the generator could have swiftly drained him to the point of stasis lock. _Wonderful. What now?_ More than anything he wanted to just lie there against the wall, think of his team and wait to join them.

He glanced at the sign on the wall, which now bore just one word.

NEUTRALYZE

_The wall. _Dead End ran his fingertips along the wall, searching for seams. There had to be electrical wires and conduits hidden behind the smooth metal, enough to charge the generator—

A flicker of movement vibrated under his fingers, as though something had run across the wall from the inside. Dead End drew his hand back, startled. Soft sounds came from within the walls, like the scurrying of a hundred rats. The row of overhead lights went out.

Dead End almost turned on his headlights, but paused when he heard metal slide over metal in the distance. It wasn't the familiar sound of transformation. He drew his gun, fuel pounding fast through his systems, air rasping through intakes.

Ten yards away, white eyes slid out of the walls. That was all Dead End saw of the security detail, the eyes. They were tiny as stars, but shone brighter than hi-beams in the dark. And there were too many to count.

Now he knew what the sliding metallic sound had been. Concealed panels in the walls had moved away to disgorge... something. Something that filled the corridor before him and behind him, watching him. The eyes multiplied like computer viruses as more and more of the security detail crawled out of the walls.

Dead End raised his gun and fired.

A burst of supercompressed air struck the eyes and they were gone in an instant. Metallic components clashed and rang off each other, like a box of nails being upended over a floor. One or two of the security detail managed to cling to the sides of the walls, but they didn't outlast the second shot. Dead End turned and fired again, clearing the other end of the corridor. He had no real objection to dying, but he wanted a clean, dignified death, not hundreds of tiny… things… swarming over him. He looked up at the sign.

SEKTOR SEALED

SEKTOR PURGE IMMYNENT

Since the corridor was straight, he could see down it for a long distance. The eyes were now so far away he could no longer make them out individually, but he saw the glowing mass swiftly swallowed up by the walls that had disgorged it. Access panels slammed shut.

_The area is now cleared of security personnel,_ he thought. _Because this sector of the tunnels is going to be purged. _

The sign bore a single number, 5. It changed to a 4.

Dead End shoved his gun back into subspace and grabbed the time machine's lever. Even if there was sufficient power, he had no idea where the machine might take him. _Chances are,_ the bleaker side of his nature reminded him, _the controls are so blasted that you'll step through the portal and be right back here._

3.

_If I give up I'll never have a chance to get them back, to make things right._ He pulled the lever.

2.

The portal sprang up.

1.

Dead End stepped through it.

* * *

The disorientation made him stagger. He was prepared for another claustrophobically small tunnel, but instead he stood on open, rubble-strewn ground that stretched out in all directions around him. It was no hologram, because there was no one to project one, and he heard bits of metal, long since corroded, crunch beneath his feet when he moved.

_So this is how it ends,_ Dead End thought, and nothing contradicted him. Nothing moved except for dust sifted by the wind. Any organic or cybernetic life-forms had long since died and either decomposed or rusted. Buildings had been leveled, probably by war, and the remains had been eroded and broken down to the point where Dead End could not have made out details in the fragments if he had tried. Nearby was the bed of a river that had dried up centuries ago, a deep trench that looked as though someone hundreds of times the size of a Cybertronian had reached down from the sky and drawn an uneven line over the ground.

Knowing what he would see, Dead End checked the power generator. There was no more red zone, because there was nothing lighting up the dials from within. The generator was completely drained.

He sat down beside it. _Well, that's it, then_. No matter how dangerous the tunnels had been, they had been constructed and powered, holding out the faint hope that he might have been able to charge the generator up somehow. _But here?_ He almost chuckled, and only caught himself by remembering how Wildrider had laughed in the grip of complete insanity. On a planet so devastated that even its native life-forms were gone, never mind the alien ones, there obviously wasn't even a wall left standing, so there couldn't be any power sockets. He had been a fool to hope, an imbecile to waste his energy trying.

Without any real interest, he wondered how far in the future he had gone, and whether Cybertron was as dead a world now as Earth was.

On the horizon, something flashed under the moonlight.

It caught Dead End's attention as anything gleaming and shiny would have, though he felt utterly numb. Unless whatever-it-was turned out to be his team, he wasn't interested. He didn't care even though it was coming closer to him, flowing around piles of rubble.

It looked like a trickle of mercury, silver and snakelike and featureless, but it moved across the landscape purposefully. Automatically, Dead End brushed a smear of dirt off his arm, but otherwise he did nothing as the quicksilver glided silently towards him. It might have been the only other living thing in sight, but he couldn't care about that either. He found himself imagining how Wildrider might have tried to play with it.

The quicksilver slid over the rubble, coiled around his ankle and began to pour itself through a transformation seam into his leg.

Dead End's systems reacted reflexively. His arm lashed out, striking the quicksilver so hard that his hand clanged loudly against his own fender-panel. The quicksilver's body burst into a hundred blobs of liquid that scattered in all directions. A energy drain warning flashed up on his HUD, and was followed by a status report that the foreign matter now within his frame was being neutralized.

The drops of molten metal began to flow back together. Shining under the glass-thin moonlight, they formed the quicksilver again. This time, it didn't see as eager to engage Dead End. Slowly, it began to trickle away.

_Well, that's better_, he thought for all of a moment before a deep subsurface tremor reached him and he turned around to see exactly what the little quicksilver had sensed.

In the distance, a great river poured itself through the dry ravine, a river that gleamed more dazzlingly bright than the moon. Hundreds of tons of liquid metal surged with the unstoppable speed of a flash flood, and yet—to Dead End—it was far more breathtaking than any Earth river could have been. It moved more quietly, left nothing of itself behind on bare rock and rusting metal, and was as ruthless in its single-minded purpose as any Decepticon might have been. The smaller quicksilver tried to worm away, but it wasn't as fast. A coil like an ocean wave sprang up from the riverbed, and when it flowed back, only one quicksilver remained.

But its forward rush had paused, and now it showed no inclination to move on. It hesitated instead. There were no sensory organs Dead End could see, but he knew in that moment it was aware of him, it was evaluating him, it detected the last flickers of energy in his frame—

_Energy. That's it._

He didn't give himself time to hesitate or doubt. He hefted the time machine on to his left shoulder—it scratched his paint with a faint shriek that set his jaws on edge—and grabbed the power generator with his right hand. The leads trailed from it, dangling. The huge quicksilver surged forward—

-and Dead End sprang to meet it.

His legs sank knee-deep in cold sludge that splattered up around him as he struggled to stay upright, to keep the time machine safe. Even as the quicksilver crawled into every seam and joint, he brought his right hand down, lowering the power generator. The cable that connected it to the time machine stretched taut across his frame, but the generator's leads dipped into the molten mass of the quicksilver's body.

Liquid metal conducted electricity just as well as wires did.

A shudder ran through the quicksilver. Dead End struggled to keep his arm braced against his body, to hold the generator above the seething mass of liquid around him—only to gasp in agony as the quicksilver fought back. It ate like acid into his legs, corroding his armor, dissolving bulletproof glass. His ankle-tires were gone in seconds, black scraps on a frothing silver tide. Warnings filled his HUD so that he saw nothing but a red blur, but he could feel the generator thrumming with power. _Hold on_, he thought, jaws clamped shut on a scream, _just hold on!_

A schematic of his own frame—missing one leg—flashed up on his HUD, but the thrum turned to a low, muted roar. The quicksilver, in its last desperate moments, boiled up around him and rose past his waist.

Dead End released the time machine and, with his now-free hand, jerked the lever up as the machine began to drop. It struck the surface of the quicksilver and the world before him turned blue.

The sound he made was no louder than a sigh as he fell forward.

* * *

Dead End crashed down on his face, and his visor cracked.

It was the final straw. He wanted to lie there—on the mercifully solid ground—for the rest of the little time he now had, because it hurt too much to move and he was dying anyway. Even his death seemed destined to be an uncomfortable one, though, because the ground was freezing. His joints stiffened and he could feel the pump of fuel through internal lines go slower, as if his own gasoline and energon had turned to a thick slurry.

_So cold_. His systems were too devastated by the quicksilver to estimate the external temperature, but he thought it was well into the subzero range. It made no sense, given that he'd been in what was formerly Oregon. Even in the Ice Age, surely temperatures on Earth hadn't fallen that low.

Dead End got his elbows under him and managed to lever his torso off the ground. He already knew he no longer had a left leg, and his right foot was so badly damaged it would not take any of his weight. As a result, he didn't try to stand, only flopped over heavily on to his back. The cold was so strut-deep that it numbed even the pain he might have felt.

And the shock made him forget even the cold as he stared up. Half the stars were gone, blotted out behind a great dark sphere that filled the sky. For a moment all Dead End could think of were stories he'd heard from the other 'cons, myths about Unicron the planet-devourer, something vast and hungry and unstoppable.

_No. Don't be a fool and don't panic. _He felt his own hands digging into the ground, fingers clenching tightly just as Wildrider had done, as if the sky would snatch him away if he didn't hold on tightly enough—

_Because that's exactly what will happen_.

In that moment he knew what the looming mass above Earth was, and why the temperature had sunk so low. _I've gone billions of years into the future, past the point where the Sun burned itself out_. And since the remains of a dead star didn't have enough gravity to hold the planets in orbit, they were drifting away. Earth was now being pulled inexorably closer to the next greatest object in space.

It was no consolation that by the time the planet sank like a stone into the frozen oceans of Jupiter, he would have long since been deactivated.

_But it isn't fair, _said a voice in the back of his mind, a voice that sounded a little like Drag Strip_. I didn't give up, I kept going, I even managed to power the slagging generator up again, so it can't end like this!_

_Oh yes, it can. It's obvious the machine won't send me anywhere except to the future, which means I'll never see my team again, any more than I could reach California by starting in Colorado and driving east. And it's equally obvious that there _is _no more future. Every mechanism grinds to a stop eventually, just as the universe itself will die._ _No happy endings for anyone—_

_Frag that. _

With the last of his strength, Dead End hauled himself up to a sitting position. The oil and lubricant seeping from the stump of his knee had turned to a congealed mass in the cold, but he ignored it. There was no more light anywhere except for the glowing green wedge on the power generator's dial. The needle was so far in the green zone that it was almost out of sight.

_If the end of everything is a certainty, then I'm going to meet it. _

He pulled the lever down, then pushed it up for the last time. The portal appeared. Bracing both hands on the machine, Dead End dragged his battered, trembling frame up. He managed to get his left knee beneath him to take some of his weight, but he didn't have the ability to even fall into the portal as he had done before. The blue sheen glowed before him, but his body was too heavy and his resources gone.

He leaned forward as far as he could, and his face touched the surface of the portal.

In that instant, time leaped like a powerful engine revved to redline. He saw stars burst into brilliant globes of flame as they went supernova, and planets glowed like embers in the blast. The stars sank down into dust and darkness, and the patches of darkness engulfed everything that crossed their path. Chunks of asteroids, tiny moons, even parts of shuttles and space probes built by species long since extinct. All were fragments on the seas of space and all were swallowed up by the black holes that in turn gave in to powerful gravitational forces that merged them into one. Earth's solar system was long since gone, the Milky Way only a memory. Dead End could feel nothing below his single remaining knee, and the only solidity in all the universe was the time machine he still clutched tightly—but that was also being drawn into the maw of the black hole that consumed the remains of the universe.

A process that would have taken billions of years shrank to seconds when seen through the unblinking blue eye of the machine. Though Dead End could see nothing any longer, because the black hole consumed even light. Still, he knew exactly what was happening as he and the time machine sank past the event horizon. All the matter in the universe was now in the grip of crushing gravity, compressed to a single point, a singularity.

The last grains in the hourglass ran out. There was no time any longer. There was nothing…

…except the time machine, broken to the point where it could only travel into the future. No future existed, but that was only the immovable object meeting the fully charged machine's irresistible force.

In the abyss, the singularity glowed like a spark—and exploded. Dead End's visual feed went white. For a moment he wasn't sure what had happened, and in that moment the time machine hurled him a billion years forward and he saw it all.

_So this is how the world begins,_ he thought. _Not with a whimper, but a bang._

Suns flared white-hot, and whirling clouds coalesced around their own cores to form planets. On Earth, tectonic plates slammed together with a sound of thunder, and he saw fish crawl out of the sea. For the first time in his life he felt a sense of wonder, but more important than that was the hope that grew, like a small but steady flame, deep in his core.

_Because I _can_ reach California from Colorado by driving east, _he thought, _if I just drive for long enough, and fly over anything wet._

A tidal wave of snow and ice swept over the land and was gone. Dead End realized that the machine was starting to slow as its power waned, but time was still hurtling past him far too fast. He kept up with the blurring speed of events before him only through Cybertronian processors built to gauge velocity in nanoseconds, spurred on by the certain knowledge that this was his last chance. Trees burst out of the ground beneath him, then crashed down as railroads shot over the landscape. Dead End scrolled frantically through memory banks to place the correct time. Pain was forgotten, his impending death was unimportant. Digits flashed over his chronometer display as he synched it with what he saw through the portal.

A plume of smoke billowed up into the sky as a volcano erupted, and the shadows of F-15 jets streaked over teeming cities. What remained of Dead End's frame tensed. The end was so close now, but he couldn't afford to overshoot the finish line. His processors drank his last drops of fuel and calculated the final point, the day and the hour. _Now_.

As fast as if had Drag Strip's reflexes behind it, his fist rammed into the center of the time machine.

The punch was as powerful as anything Motormaster had ever delivered. It dislocated all the fingers in Dead End's left hand and staved in the side of the time machine, snapping wires and crushing a circuitboard. The portal flickered like heat lightning. Dead End let go of the machine, unbalancing him—but with one leg gone, the upper part of his body was now heavier than the lower.

He toppled forward and through the portal an instant before it went down.

* * *

This time, it did not hurt so much to land on his face; the ground was thick with brown leaves. Normally Dead End would have hated that—the feel of something damp and organic against his plating—but given a choice between the bleak surface of the ruined planet he had seen, and the leaves and dew and air, he supposed that was the lesser of two evils. He couldn't raise his helm off the ground, but he managed to turn his head just enough to catch one glimpse of the sky's edge. It was early morning, a morning as quiet and undisturbed as the surface of a datapad that had never been used before, fresh from the assembly plant.

His HUD flashed a warning for the final time. EMERGENCY FUEL EXHAUSTED. STASIS LOCK IMMINENT.

_If the timeline doesn't erase me first. _Dead End shunted the last of his energy away from his sensors and to his combat radar. The world went dark and silent as his optics and audials shut down, but he saw all he needed to see on the radar screen—five blips as the Stunticons sped along the highway and two small bright points in the distance.

His comm opened. Automatically he started to ping the other Dead End, but cut the transmission in the next instant. _Would I listen to a preposterous story like this? Without knowing anything at all about how it came about? _No, there was only one mech in the world who might hear him out, only one mech who could make sure none of it ever happened again.

He accessed the channel Wheeljack had used before when speaking to him, a frequency he'd never tried before. _Please let that mean it's Autobot-only._ He felt small jerky movements shaking his frame, and wasn't sure if he was trembling in desperation or whether those were convulsions as more and more of his systems shut down.

"_Who is this?" _Wheeljack's voice said.

"_Dead End._" Before the Autobot could reply, Dead End continued, the words spilling out in a graceless rush. "_Please, listen to me. The time machine you've developed? You have to destroy it._"

"_How did you know I—_"

"_Because we found you!_" On his viewscreen, Dead End saw the five blips slew off the highway—but they turned in his direction, away from the Autobots. For the first time he let himself believe that he might succeed, that his team's sacrifices wouldn't be in vain. "_The other Stunticons and I, we found you and… and…_" Primus, what was the other Autobot's name?

Just in time, he remembered what Wheeljack had shouted as Motormaster cut the black mech down. _"…you and Trailbreaker, yes, that's it, and you inadvertently took us into the past. The Autobots were all killed as a result, and my team died as well. I'm from that past, from a different timeline, and I'm about to deactivate. Even if you don't want to destroy that machine, don't let anyone go through…"_

All the light faded from his radar screen. Dead End froze, then realized that there was nothing on the other end of his comm either. The timeline had finally caught up with him.

He wondered whether his team would be… wherever he was going. Whether they would come for him.

The pain was gone. The deadweight of his frame slipped away easily, no longer something he had to worry about. His finish was ruined, of course, but his last thought was that no one was likely to see him in such a condition. No one from the future, anyway, and the future was all that remained now.

Far away, he heard the impatient rev of a high-performance engine, and Wildrider's laughter.

* * *

"It's gone," Dead End said blankly.

"What d'you mean, gone?" Motormaster was in an almost amiable mood after large-scale destruction, but that could always change.

_I mean, my radar previously registered a mech just a few miles away, and now it doesn't. Since Skywarp isn't supposed to be in the vicinity... _"It might have something to do with those other two mechs," he said finally, hoping Motormaster would decide to blame them and not him. "An Autobot trick, perhaps?"

Motormaster braked, tires sliding halfway across the road as he came to a halt. The single signal had been closer to their location, so he had directed the Stunticons there first, but to have a target simply vanish on them was not acceptable. Dead End came to a stop and transformed, resigned to whatever would happen next. He knew the disappearing blip wasn't likely to be an Autobot trap, given that the two other mechs his radar had picked up were well to the west while the other signal had been to their east, but he didn't know what other explanation there was.

_Unless my radar's glitching. Perhaps I've picked up a virus which is corrupting my cerebral circuitry beyond repair. _

"Well, don't just stand there!" Motormaster transformed as well. "You got a fix on that mech's position, didn't you? Go on and—"

An explosion far to the west made them both spin around. Drag Strip transformed and came up holding his gravito-gun, while Wildrider's engine revved eagerly. "What the frag was _that_?" he said.

"A big loud boom," Dead End said. "And I believe it scared the Autobots off. They're departing at high speed." _What a waste of time this detour has been._

Motormaster looked irresolute for a moment before his features knotted. "What are you still here for, Dead End?"

Obviously he didn't just want to give up and go home, so Dead End sighed inwardly, remembered to draw his own gun and plodded into the woods to the location where he estimated the single signal had come from. Behind him, he heard Drag Strip pushing through shrubs and foliage, so Dead End considerately waited for him to catch up and allowed him to go first. Drag Strip shook wet leaves off his shoulders and strode through a clearing, but Dead End paused in the middle of it. The signal had come from that location, but nothing was in sight.

He glanced around, then looked down. There were no tire-tracks which would indicate an Autobot had driven out of the clearing. The broken branches were behind him, and only the prints of Drag Strip's feet showed on the grass before him.

Those, and something almost hidden in a clump of long grass, something which gleamed a dull purple in the first sunlight. He turned it over cautiously with the tip of one foot, just in case it exploded. It was a visor just like his, except it was covered with dust and cracked into the bargain.

_Perhaps Drag Strip stepped on it, _he thought._  
_

"Well, there's nothing here," Drag Strip said, and Dead End looked at him. Evidently disappointed, he subspaced his gun and transformed. "You didn't sort of… _imagine_ you saw something on your radar, did you? So you wouldn't have to bother chasing down those two 'bots, I mean?"

"I _imagine_ that's one of the things you'll never know," Dead End said calmly—he was far too used to Drag Strip to allow himself to be riled. Before Drag Strip could retort, Motormaster commed them both.

"_What's taking you so long?_" he said. "_If you didn't find anything we can report, get your afts out here. Soundwave has another assignment for us._"

Drag Strip weaved around him and raced out of the clearing, while Dead End followed at a more sedate pace. "_We're on our way_," he replied.

"_About slagging time_," Motormaster said, and the Stunticons drove away.

* * *

**Author's note: Thanks for reading, and I hope you liked the fic! Much appreciation especially to anon_decepticon for brainstorming the original idea with me.  
**

**All titles are inspired by science fiction works involving time travel. **

_Fallen Heroes_. A _Star Trek: Deep Space Nine _novel by Dafydd ab Hugh (1994).

"A Sound of Thunder". A short story by Ray Bradbury (1952).

_Slaughterhouse-Five_. A novel by Kurt Vonnegut (1969).

_The Sleeper Awakes._ A novel by H. G. Wells (1910).

_A Wrinkle in Time_. A novel by Madeleine L'Engle (1962).

_Ashes to Ashes. _A British television series (2008).

_The Butterfly Effect. _A psychological thriller film (2004).

_Judgment Day._ Second film in the _Terminator _series (1991).

_Back to the Future._ This one needs no explanation (1985).


End file.
